COURSE NUMBER: MBA290T.2A
COURSE TITLE: Topics in Open Innovation
UNITS OF CREDIT: 1.0
INSTRUCTOR: Henry Chesbrough
E-MAIL ADDRESS: chesbrou@haas.berkeley.edu
CLASS WEB PAGE LOCATION: http://bspace.berkeley.edu
MEETING DAY(S)/TIME: Mondays, 2:00pm to 4:00pm during Fall A (8/20 – 10/8)
PREREQUISITE(S): None.
CLASS FORMAT: This class will feature a series of lectures from both industry practitioners of open innovation and academic researchers studying open innovation. Students will thus develop an understanding of both the theory and practice of Open Innovation.
REQUIRED READINGS: Students will be required to read Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, by Henry Chesbrough. There will be no additional required readings in advance of each class. Speakers’ presentations will be made available after each class.
BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE: Students must prepare three 2-page write-ups on the presentations delivered. At least one must be an academic presentation, while at least one must be an industry presentation. At the end of the term, students must also either turn in a) a final 5 page paper on Open Innovation, utilizing the book and the lectures to illustrate the concept, discuss its significance, its strengths and its limitations; or b) join a team of students to turn in a 10 page paper that applies the concepts of open innovation to an organization selected by the team.
ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND
OBJECTIVES: Open Innovation outlines a new environment for industrial R&D, and
demonstrates that this new environment replaces the logic of an earlier era,
where innovation was closed off from outside ideas and technologies. A
century ago, many leading industrial companies held knowledge monopolies, where
they led the industry, and indeed, the world, in the critical discoveries that
supported their industry. Today, these knowledge monopolies have been
largely broken up. As a leading technologist recently put it, “not all
the smart people work for you”. Companies must open their innovation
process to leverage external pools of knowledge, instead of being closed to
them in the pursuit of their internal agendas. In addition, companies
spend an enormous amount of money on R&D, yet most companies restrict the
output of their work to their own (current) businesses. Companies thus
err by making too little use of others’ ideas in their own businesses, and they
also err by allowing too little use of their own ideas in others’
businesses. Students taking this course will understand this new approach
to managing innovation, see that approach in a variety of contexts, and then
have the opportunity to demonstrate the application of that knowledge to a
situation of their own choosing.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: A popular Haas and MOT professor, Henry Chesbrough is the author of Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, published in 2003 by Harvard Business School Press, which was named "One of the Best Business Books of 2003" by Strategy & Business Magazine. Since publishing this landmark work, Chesbrough has written two additional books: Open Business Models (HBS Press, 2006), which received BusinessWeek’s award of one of the 10 best books of the year, and Open Services Innovation (Jossey Bass, 2011), which extends open innovation into services. He received his Ph.D. from Haas. Before joining academia, he worked for ten years as a senior executive at Quantum Corporation in the disk drive industry. Chesbrough's work examines the management of innovation, with particular attention to new models of industrial R&D, business model innovation, technology spin-offs, licensing in and licensing out technology, corporate entrepreneurship, and corporate venture capital. His academic research has been published in Research Policy, Industrial and Corporate Change, Business History Review, and the Journal of Evolutionary Economics. He has also published managerial articles in the Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, and Sloan Management Review.