Open Innovation Practice Day: Networking and Knowledge Transfer
Open innovation means an improvement for companies on many levels: more innovative, faster, more cost-effective. But how is the method successfully implemented? More than 80 registered participants had the opportunity to get to know the strategy on the basis of practical examples and to get inspiration and ideas from many experts for their own projects at the Open Innovation Practice Day in the house of Salzburg Research.
Knowledge transfer and networking
What is Open Innovation and how can new methods be integrated into everyday business? As part of the Federal Government’s Open Innovation Strategy, organized by ITG – Innovation Service for Salzburg and Salzburg Research, the Practice Day showed with concrete lectures specific action options for the design of innovation processes in the digital age. Workshops on intellectual property and IP rights, crowdfunding in practice or design thinking rounded off the program.
Value Creation and Success Factors
Among the speakers was Veronika Hornung-Prehauser, Head of Innovation Labs at Salzburg Research. It showed how companies can benefit from openly accessible innovation and technology workshops such as Makerspaces, FabLabs, R&D&I Labs. “Open innovation has many advantages for companies and a huge positive impact on innovation”, explains Hornung-Prehauser. “Companies and organizations thus gain access to numerous creative ideas and increase their success rates through greater customer and market orientation. Technology workshops perform an important function in the course of such an innovation process.”
In this context, Hornung-Prähauser presented the EU project Labs4SME. It examines forms and success factors of cooperation between companies with open technology workshops, MakerSpaces, FabLabs and innovation laboratories of research. It shows in best practice examples how SMEs, expecially in the early stages of innovation, can benefit from an open experimentation room and design as well as idea development, material testing, prototype production and small batch production.
