Open Innovation 2.0

Last week (13-14 June), we had the unique opportunity to attend the Open Innovation 2.0 conference, here at home, in Cluj-Napoca. Open Innovation 2.0 is a European Comission event belonging to OISPG, and this year it was organised by ARIES Technology cluster of Cluj in cooperation with the municipality of Cluj-Napoca. The event lasted two full days and we got the opportunity to learn about what is Open Innovation 2.0, what kind of projects exist around Europe on this topic, how much is the municipality and the universities interested in it, and what the citizens can do to foster Open Innovation.

All in all, it was a very interesting event, mainly from the perspective of the networking as we met a lot of people with different background: People from the industry, from EU, from city halls, from academia and simple citizens. All parts of the ‘ quadrupel helix’ were represented. The presentations were not that interesting, as there were a lot of repetitions mainly in terms of background.

Which made me think that probably for this kind of conferences, you need a more detailed curation of the programme, rather than just invite people to talk about a specific topic. Since people touch upon the same problems, they usually tend to repeat a lot a lot of stuff making the conference very slow and boring. Instead, what if we would ask some people to focus on the background, some people go straight to the solutions, some people talk about the implications and some talk about future work. That’s in contrast to what is happening now, which is that everybody is talking about all of these.

Maybe I should consider this in the next conference that I will be involved as organiser.