At the end of February I traveled to the Bay Area (Europeans frequently call it Silicon Valley) to learn more about Open Innovation of companies and start-ups as well as about start-ups in the field of Artificial Intelligence. I’ve been planing already for a while to connect with the global “innovation” hub and used the trip to learn best practices in both domains.
The two-weeks learning journey started in Berkeley at Cal, the University of California Berkeley, where a good friend of mine did a research semester at Haas School of Business. Getting to know the open mindset and having a nice conversation with Henry Chesbrough kickstarted my trip to the Bay Area. Henry is famous for coining the term “Open Innovation” and does a lot of research in this domain with the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation. The team of next47 also matchmakes start-ups for collaborations with the Siemens AG and we had great conversations on best practices and bad practices when doing open innovation with start-ups. The trend scouting is an essential topic as well as the visibility in and the strong network of the Bay Area. An impressive open innovation project (not sure if start-ups are involved) is the Airbus – Siemens e-aircraft moonshot.