Abstract:

Open Innovation (OI) as a concept and a process is an important new tool for education, underlining the knowledge interaction and dissemination between, education, research and industry. This paper is about the Open Design Innovation Project developed at the Faculty of Architecture of Technical University of Lisbon, since 2009, and it analyzes in detail the Dutch Cancer Society Box live case study. Education can have proven benefits from open innovation, enlarging students capacities and improving their access power.
There’s so many water under the bridges since Henry Chesbrough presented the OI concept, in his book Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology (Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA). The year was 2003, a crucial one, just before the blogging popularity, the creation of Facebook (2004) and YouTube (2005), a marvellous period of social networking and World Wide Web empowerment.
According to Chesbrough, «Open Innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology... At its roots, Open Innovation assumes that useful knowledge is widely distributed, and that even the most capable R&D organizations must identify, connect to, and leverage external knowledge sources as a core process in innovation» (Chesbrough, 2003, pp. 2-3).
Our Open Design Innovation Project applies this concept using several OI platforms like Innocentive, Redesignme, GuerraCreativa, Innovaro or Idea Bounty, in order to develop solutions to challenges created by seekers. Since 2009, we have involved almost one hundred students solving challenges for companies and institutions all over the world, including the one developed here: the redesign of the Dutch Cancer Society donation box.
In 2010, this Open Design Innovation Project was selected for an international TEDx Talk and included in the Open Innovation Community website created at the University of California, Berkeley ( http://www.openinnovation.net/open-innovation/carlos-oliveira-santos-tedxedges-speech-on-open-innovation/ ).
On our own evaluation of this work, according to results and students’ opinions, we had achieved several goals: experience our skills; open the scope of our work; submitting it to professionals; cross cultures interventions; be evaluated by others; be selected and applied; to participate in live cases.

Keywords:

Open innovation, educational experimentation, live case studies, teaching methods.