President Obama Honored by Berkeley-Haas for Global Leadership in Open Innovation

The University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business honored US President Barack Obama with the Award for Outstanding Global Leadership in Open Innovation at the World Open Innovation Conference held at ESADE Business School, Ramon Llull University, Barcelona, Spain, today (Dec. 16, 2016).

Marcos C. Mandojana, Consul General of the United States of America in Barcelona, accepted the award on the President’s behalf.

Every year at its World Open Innovation Conference, the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at Berkeley-Haas recognizes a global leader who applies the concept of open innovation to create significant change. Pranab Mukherjee, the President of India, received the inaugural award in 2015.

Open innovation asserts that an organization should make greater use of external ideas in its business and allow its own ideas to be used by others outside of the organization in order to accelerate innovation.

The Garwood Center presented the award to President Obama for his achievements in championing open innovation through government initiatives and programs for youth, researchers, academics, and entrepreneurs. These initiatives include, among others:

• The Open Government Initiative, which focuses on transparency, participation, and collaboration, and has brought forth successful crowdsourcing and peer-production initiatives at the local, state, and federal levels.

• The Educate to Innovate Program, launched in 2009 to raise American students’ achievements in science and math over the next decade—with the help of leading companies, foundations, non-profits, and science and engineering societies.
• The Next-generation Hubs Program, which provides online tools to entrepreneurs to start a business in a single day.
• The New Strategy for American Innovation to improve performance and create a better environment for innovation in federal government by offering areas of opportunity from self-driving cars to smart cities.
• The Smart Cities initiative, which invested more than $160 million in federal research and leveraged more than 20 cities participating in new multi-city collaboration, to help local communities tackle key challenges from reducing traffic congestion to fighting crime and fostering economic growth.
• The Nation of Makers initiative to give more students, entrepreneurs, and citizens access to a new class of technologies,such as 3D printers, laser cutters, and desktop machine tools. Federal agencies, companies, non-profits, cities, and schools are collectively making commitments to create more than 1,000 maker-oriented spaces in the United States.
   

About the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation:
The Garwood Center at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business promotes academic research and the practice of open innovation and entrepreneurship across the globe through executive programs, student curricula, academic research, and collaborative international open innovation conferences. The center seeks to promote open innovation as a means to benefit the global economy by improving businesses’ profitability, competitive advantage, stability, and adaptability.

For more information, contact:
Solomon Darwin, Executive Director of Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation, at darwin@haas.berkeley.edu or
Henry Chesbrough, Faculty Director of Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation, at chesbrou@haas.berkeley.edu