Globalization, mass access to information and competition to win over talent have made the companies’ traditional business model obsolete, causing a change in their organizations. Henry Chesbrough, professor in Berkeley, was one of the first who bet on overthrowing preconceived ideas about business innovation, coining the term “open innovation”.
Lately, big pharmaceutical companies have cast doubt upon their own business models due to the increase of costs and risks, the need to understand patients better and the chance to gain access to better tools, technologies and ideas. Similarly, the centers of knowledge of biomedicine started being aware of the fact that pharmaceutical companies’ resources could be the tool and driving force for their researches to have a clinical application. Realizing this has led to a cultural change that has made it feasible to be competence and cooperation among companies, entities and organizations.
“Nowadays nobody has a monopoly on knowledge. If we want to innovate, we have to depend on external collaborators, partners and companies that can provide added value.” This declaration from Henry Chesbrough discloses the key point of open innovation.
Unlike closed innovation - based on the industrial secrets, the development within the company itself and the protection of the discovery -, open innovation moves towards a change of paradigm, which entails many interdisciplinary groups involved in a single project and cooperation to make the efforts laid out in R&D more profitable. In summary, it refers to a large and strategic vision of business and projects and the capacity of adaptation to achieve market approval and thus become more competitive through collaboration.
According to Chesbrough, innovation is a process of constant learning. “Anybody can be an innovator.” Therefore, open innovation can come out within the organization by putting team work into practice, sharing data and promoting creativity.
In fact, clusters like Biopol’H are excellent environments to carry out open innovation. It is intended to boost the creation, transference and diffusion of new knowledge in biomedicine and Health Science with the interrelation and complementarity of the welfare, scientific, formative, social and business fields. Biopol’H takes on that only upon the basis of this principle of open innovation it is possible to get enough synergy so that the knowledge management generated by all the professionals returns to society.
In short, the new model is about generating synergies and coming up with new ideas which, together with the ones produced inside the organization, enable a better accomplishment by optimizing resources and time. Open innovation facilitates the access to real problems and market demands and offers a better approach between university and company, making it possible to find new ways of financing as well as to increase the level of collaboration.
On the other hand, as far as intellectual property is concerned, it is not about the free sharing of patents but a personalized collaboration, since uncommercialized patents can acquire a real value with the identification of opportunities.
As Henry Chesbrough said, “If intelligent people from an organization is connected with people from outside, then their innovation processes won’t reinvent the wheel. Even more, the results of their efforts will be increased several times over because of the nearness with other ideas and inspirations.”
