Berkeley Innovation Forum
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The Berkeley Innovation Forum is a membership organization hosted by Dr. Henry Chesbrough and the Center for Open Innovation.
In brief, the Berkeley Innovation Forum is a community of innovation leaders that meet to exchange ideas, issues, and practices in innovation management, and to fund research of interest to the group. Through an environment of non-competing companies, BIF members explore new ways to advance the management of innovation by engaging openly with one another.
The motivation behind the BIF is that the way that business schools studying innovation is fundamentally broken. The study of business is not a science in the academic sense of the word. Yet business schools organize as though it was. A far better model is the model of medical schools, who pursue fundamental research on the biological mechanisms of disease, and join that research to clinical practice that translates research breakthroughs into new therapies for patients.
Business schools have outsourced the equivalent of their clinical practice to consulting firms. That might be fine, so long as the work of translating research into new business “therapies” is still being done. However, the feedback loop in medicine that provides researchers with the results of new therapies is missing in business. If a patient dies from a gene therapy experiment, the research community learns about this quickly, and the research agenda underlying gene-based research changes as a result. However, a consulting firm could translate some business school research into a new therapy without ever notifying the academic research community about its experience. Whether the therapy works well, or does terribly, business school academics might never hear about it.Certainly those results are not published to the research community in the way that medical therapy results are published.
Within its scope, the BIF is closing the gap between innovation theory, and innovation practice, by incorporating more clinical experience into the open innovation research agenda.
To date, Forum members include IBM, Ricoh, NEC, Wipro, Kellogg, Kraft Foods, Solvay, Heatcraft, Unilever, Air Products, Coca Cola, and Eastman Chemical. Meetings are twice a year, with the Fall meeting held in Berkeley, and the Spring meeting hosted at a company’s location. Membership costs $10,000 per year. For more information about BIF, please contact Henry Chesbrough, Executive Director of the Center for Open Innovation, at chesbrou@haas.berkeley.edu
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