About Us | Exnovate

Vision - Mission - Strategy

Vision

Collaborative forms of innovation are here to stay. In a world with continuously increasing knowledge mobility, interconnectivity and a need to go beyond what could be called straightforward innovations, open innovation offers a perfect complement to more traditional closed forms of innovation. However easy and logical the concepts might seem, implementing them is a totally different story. We believe a market for OI knowledge exchange should be created. Providing transparancy, overview and preparing this market, is what Exnovate should do!

Mission

Exnovate aims to become the highly visible, leading European network of excellence on managing and oganizing open & collaborative innovation.

Strategy

As companies experience several problems when they implement open innovation, different consultancy companies and services have offered a variety of management tools to cope with multiple management and organizational challenges that are related to the introduction of open innovation in an organization.

It is an attractive growth market for consultants and ‘innomediaries’ and entry barriers are quite low. The result is this market is growing at an exponential rate and it is rapidly becoming fragmented and crowded. It is increasingly difficult for client firms to keep track of the evolution in the market and there are no objective indicators to measure the quality of the services these companies offer.

As the market becomes increasingly opaque, value can be created by making the market more transparent, by introducing objective quality standards, and by improving the connectivity between different partners who are interested in open innovation. Several organizations and intermediaries have been doing that already for technological problems, but there has been no systematic efforts to clear the market for management and organization problems in related to open innovation.

We therefore established Exnovate, a non-profit platform for companies and knowledge intensive organizations that are practicing open and collaborative innovation. In particular, it serves as a clearinghouse and network platform, linking together the international community of companies, academia, governments and service providers.

Core Team

Besides the obvious support of Exnovate's founders, the Executive Board and the Exnovate Council, our organization is further supported by these very talented individuals:

Servaas Bosch

Jingshu Du

Steven Peleman

Dr. Nadine Roijakkers

Prof.dr. Wim Vanhaverbeke

Exnovate, the European Network of Excellence on Open & Collaborative Innovation, originated from the pioneering work of prof.dr. Wim Vanhaverbeke together with prof. Henry Chesbrough and other domain experts. As several captains of industry, government officials and academic peers gradually learned about the topic of open innovation, they soon welcomed the idea to create a European Hub for knowledge exchange on collaborative forms of innovation. A place where OI best practices could be exchanged and where a genuine market for OI expertise would be prepared and organized for all stakeholders.

As with all initiatives of this scale, it is because of the entrepreneurial spirit, motivation and industrious effort of a few hard-boiled believers, that this network was created. Their names:

Prof. dr. Wim Vanhaverbeke

Steven Peleman

Jeroen Deleu

Marc Van Gastel

Prof. dr. Henry Chesbrough

Exnovate is a platform bringing together companies that are experienced or interested in open & collaborative innovation. We offer three types of networking services:

- OPEN INNOVATION FORUM for large and medium sized companies with best practices in open innovation
- C4C: "Companies for Companies" are short term specialized programs that provide an in-depth body of knowledge about the best OI practices. These programs are taught by experts from experienced companies to their peers in less experienced firms.
- OI FOR SMEs: Open and collaborative innovation is also very valuable for SMEs. We like to bring together best practices in Europe and around the globe.

Exnovate also brings together companies with the academic world. Have a look at the academic network of Exnovate. We can combine theory and practice leading to better (open) innovation practices.

Open & collaborative innovation, in addition to other forms of innovation, can be a tremendous driver for regional and international prosperity in both the short and the long run. The facilitation of innovation depends at least to some extent on the policy framework in which it resides, so please check out and contribute to the available information on this website.

Exnovate connects researchers who have top expertise in different subjects related to crowd-sourcing, open innovation, collaboration between innovation partners, and innovation networks. Exnovate offers them a platform to set up research projects that may fit in international research programs financed by the European Community or other international organizations. In addition, companies and governments can look for expertise among these academics to execute specific types of research projects about open innovation.

Currently we are developing a library of teaching cases and syllabi about user innovation, open & collaborative innovation. You can also find the list of top researchers that back the network.

Exnovate does not offer first line advice. The success of open innovation generated a fast growing market for all kinds consulting and service firms. Identification of the right providers is difficult and a standard for the service quality is non-existent. This is where Exnovate can play a role.