The 8^th edition of the World Open Innovation Conference (WOIC 2021) will be held on December 9 and 10 at the High Tech Campus Eindhoven in the Netherlands. On December 8, interested participants have the opportunity to visit several parts of the flourishing ecosystem in what is called the Brainport Eindhoven region. Moreover, on December 11, there will be a dedicated workshop day, which will be held at the campus of the Eindhoven University of Technology.

The conference theme of WOIC is “Building Succesful Ecosystems Through Open Innovation”, which should be very fitting considering not only the global developments in research and practice but also the specific location of this year’s conference. In general, open innovation describes “a distributed innovation process based on purposively managed knowledge flows across organizational boundaries.” It provides insights into how firms can harness inflows and outflows of knowledge to improve their innovation success. During the last two decades, open innovation has had profound impact on both the practice and study of innovation. In parallel to open innovation becoming a central feature of innovation management, the concept of innovation ecosystems has also gained much attention from both research and practice. In the face of innovation, one organization’s success will depend on the efforts of other innovators in its environment. With this year’s conference theme we want to highlight the potential of applying what we know about open innovation in order to build successful ecosystems. And indeed, the High Tech Campus Eindhoven is an excellent location for doing this. In fact, a defining moment in the history of the High Tech Campus was when the Philips company, which used this campus as its research facility, decided to literally open its doors and make the campus accessible to external parties to enable interactions and knowledge flows in line with its emerging open innovation strategy. This has now resulted in a thriving ecosystem of more than 200 companies with more than 12,000 innovators, researchers and engineers, created what has been called the “smartest square km in the world”.

Robert-Jan Smits, President of the Executive Board of Eindhoven University of Technology, welcomes the World Open Innovation Conference to Eindhoven: https://youtu.be/Kyr5Gd9Ovrc