Open innovation maestro Henry Chesbrough awarded Viipuri Prize

Berkeley Haas faculty member Henry Chesbrough, whose open innovation paradigm has had a significant impact on modern business thinking, has been awarded the Viipuri Prize by Finland’s LUT School of Business and Management.

Chesbrough, who is an adjunct professor and faculty director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation, will receive the award in June at LUT University’s Lappeenranta campus in Finland. The award comes with a 10,000 euro prize.

“Professor Chesbrough is widely known as the father of open innovation. Two decades later, the paradigm remains relevant,” said Sami Saarenketo, Dean of LUT School of Business and Management (LBM), in the announcement.

The Viipuri Prize is awarded biennially to an internationally acclaimed top researcher whose work has had a significant impact on the research and teaching at LBM. The first prize was awarded to another Berkeley Haas professor, David Teece, in 2003.

That was the same year Chesbrough published his first book on open innovation; his work has since been cited nearly 100,000 times. The central idea of open innovation is that companies should use both external and internal ideas and paths to market and advance their technology. According to Chesbrough, companies cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research but should instead buy or license processes and inventions from other companies. In addition, business ideas that are not used internally should be taken outside the company through joint ventures or spin-offs.

At the Viipuri Prize ceremony June 3, Chesbrough he will deliver a lecture on “The promise and limits of open innovation after the pandemic.” For more information, see the full press release.

 

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