Yet2com Blog

We hosted our fist conference in the early spring of 2000 Lake Tahoe with 13 companies present.  It was more of a benchmarking session really, but it was a very helpful way for us to hear from our key clients and to make our offering better, but more importantly it a way for them to share learning on how technology to optimize out licensing and in-licensing.

We did not call it Open Innovation in those days.  The next year we hosted it in Atlanta with 43 companies present.  Here is where we made a key learning – no one wanted to hear from us or consultants – they wanted to hear from each other.  Going forward we optomized the speakers into 5 categories:

1. CIO’s who are presented the strategy of their organization; like Rob van Leen of DSM or Cheryl Perkins of Kimberly Clark
2. Case studies – where preferably both sides of a deal spoke on how we introduced them, and how they completed the deal, and how it is working
3. Industry round tables, like the one below, which I loved because it represented 4% of the world’s corporate R&D capacity.
4. New Technologies – we present about 20 new technologies that we think are transformational.
5. Visionaries like Dr Oz , John Sculley and Dean Kamen

Lawrence Bickers (BT), Bill Heming (Caterpillar), Bob Hirsch (DuPont), Ruud Peters (Philips), Jeff Weedman (P&G)- Industry Panel Discussion

In 2004 we broke the events in to 2 types; regional benchmarking sessions that we host in; Tokyo, London, Philadelphia and San Francisco roughly quarterly.  These are smaller, I day events to share learnings and best practices.  We also host an annual global conference, where we take pride in getting attendees from Europe, Asia and North America.  Recently we have had attendance from about 100 of the Fortune 500 participate.

We host these conferences, because as hard as we try, dealmaking and success in Open Innovation is ultimately about people.

Relationships matter.  They are more important than a network and more important than a technology fit…..so we spend more effort on making sure there is a people match.  No matter how strong of a technical fit there is, if there people dont get along there will not be a deal.

We are assembling our 10th event, in 10 years, in Boston on September 29th through October 1st.  The theme this year is dealmaking.  There is a lot of research on optimizing OI, but ultimately it’s about dealmaking.   The speaker line up is impressive Some of the keynotes include:

Jeff Weedman, VP of External Business Development at P&G and as a far as I’m concerned is the father of Open Innovation

Tom Reeves, VP of IP at IBM.  Tom is creating a platform for his 3,000 reports to drive Open Innovation across IBM

Zia Yusuf  leads SAP’s Global Ecosystem Group.  Zia is chartered with building an open ecosystem of software to create communities of innovation.

These are 3 of about 20 speakers.  This years will be our best event because it will show how the recession is good for Open Innovation.  Open Innovation is what will bring large companies out of the recession…but that is the topic of another blog …..if you have any questions drop me a note.  See you there!

PS  you can register here The price goes up on August 31st.

Below is a list of registered companies by August 10th. We have 57 confirmed.

AGC AGFA Amway AT&T Avery Dennison BAE Bayer Innovation Colgate-Palmolive Crown Holdings DSM Dupont Fairmount Partners Georgia-Pacific Georgia Power Halliburton IBM INVISTA KISCO MaTech NASA National Institute for Materials Science NEC Newell Rubbermaid Omron PATEV Philips P&G Shell Rockwell Collins SAP Savannah River Nuclear Solutions Sekisui Integrated Research Shell Sony Unilever Tyco Electronics Western International Gas & Cylinders

This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 1:04 am and is filed under commentary, open innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.