KIMbcn and Biopol'H organized last thursday June 17th the first breakfast of Henry Chesbrough with managers of pharmaceutical companies. During the event professor Chesbrough explained the model of open innovation and gave some examples of its aplication in pharmaceutical industry.

Professor Henry Chesbrough is PhD in Administration and Public Policies for Hass School of Business, University of California, MBA for Stanford University and BA for Yale University. Chesbrough is the creator and director of the Center of Open Innovation, University of Berkeley and Strategic Advisory of KIMbcn since January 2009. He has applied open innovation in several pharmaceutical companies and is the author of Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology and Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape, among others.

• In the Spanish context, in times of lack of aids and economy cuts, how will you suggest to apply innovation to business?

Because of the economic crisis, growth in the Spanish economy is even more important now than ever, because the only way of repay the debt without punishing the population is to create new growth. This new growth can only come from innovation. What I am showing in my research is that innovation is changing from a close model to an open model, a model that is more collaborative, a model that engages more participants from the users or the consumers all the way trough to the research institutes and the universities. So in order to create new innovation we must mobilize all these resources and conduct their actions into new products and activities.

• Which ideas or suggestions would you give to small start-ups or spin-offs in Spain in order to prosper with some guarantees of success?

The most valuable source of capital comes from your customers, so the opportunity I see for the start-ups and small and medium companies is try to build more collaborative relations with the costumers and for the customers. Because of this open model I am saying to them it is better to work more collaboratively with your suppliers as well. So for both parts there is a benefit from closer cooperation precisely because you can move faster if you work together.

• Which is the importance of the cooperation between public and private business with University?

In the early stages of innovation much of the science and the technology is going to come from public or university sources. Even large companies today are relying more and more on universities, research institutes and public-private partnerships for the building blocks they will then use in their own innovative activities. So is actually becoming more important now, and one of the areas we must be very careful with in the budget crisis is not to kill the sources of innovative opportunity by cutting too much the spending on the early stages of science and technology in the public and university sectors.

• Will the transfer of knowledge prosper in Spain with open innovation?

There is a very important problem here in Spain, many people feel that the university technology is too early before industry to find it useful, and this is one of the motivations for the creation of science parks. Try to advance the technology further, to make it more useful for industry. I don’t think we have enough data to say if the science parks are working well or not, but they are trying to fill this gap between the university and the business. Another gap is in the people, because in order to really get technologies from universities and research institutes to industry, some of the people are going to have to follow that, which means that university professors are going to need to advice and collaborate with people in industry. People in industry are going to need to create scientific and technical advisory boards to bring these people into the industry decision processes and in order to educate universities in what industry needs from academia. So this is some additional work that has to be done.

• Which is the difference between invention and innovation?

Invention is the discovery of new knowledge. It is very important for the society to continue inventing. But invention does not mean that the company that invents the discovery is always going to be able to capture the value in the market. And it was because of that problem that I came to develop the idea of open innovation as an alternative to try to manage that exact problem.