Open to user innovation

I’m now finally back in California, after five days and four nights in the Boston area. The first four days were spent at the HBS-MIT conference on user innovation, which was held at Harvard Business School Monday-Wednesday.

This is the sixth conference, but the first to mention “open innovation” and the first one I’d attended. I’ve been blogging on some of the interesting stuff over at my open innovation blog. (BTW, this is not a brand extension too far — the OI blog is intended to be a summary of academic research related to open innovation, for an academic or semi-academic audience).

On Wednesday night and Thursday until I dashed to the airport, I was at the MIT libraries (and also the archives) doing research for my planned book, From MIT to Qualcomm. I found some fascinating tidbits, like the terms of the endowment that made Claude Shannon in 1957 one of MIT’s first endowed professors.

I’m probably going to be offline much of the next week, as I head Friday to the annual Academy of Management conference, which draws some 6,000 professors and graduate students in OB, strategy, entrepreneurship and related management disciplines to listen to workshop, papers and panel discussions.

On Friday I’m speaking to entrepreneurship doctoral students, on Sunday I’m talking about standardization, and on Monday I’m presenting the open innovation side at a panel session on user and open innovation.

Did I mention that the conference is in Anaheim? Anyone who’s met my daughter (and my wife’s aversion to roller coasters) knows that somewhere in there I’ll be spending time at the Magic Kingdom.