World Conference on Intellectual Capital

Today the 8th World Conference on Intellectual Capital for Communities (#ic8) started in Paris. As always it takes place at the Paris office of the Worldbank at 66 Avenue d’Iena. The country focus this year is South Korea. In this blog post I provide some notes I took during the conference. Please feel free to add information, indeas and links via comments. You can also find some pictures of the New Club of Paris General Assembly 2012 in a set on Flickr.

The OECD Programme for Intangibles

• Speaker: Alistair Nolan (OECD)
• Sources for Intangible assets: Corrado, Haskel, Jona-Lasino, Iommi (2010), Corrado et. al. (2012)
• Intangible asset types: software, databases, innovative property, adverting/marketing, organizational change, firm-specific skills (personal remark: what about PEOPLE? No asset?)
• Framework policies in focus: macro-economic, education and training, labour market, competition, tax, corporate finance (personal remark: see e.g. the IIRC initiative on Integrated Reporting).
• Findings of the OECD project can be downloaded at www.oecd.org/dataoecd/24/3/50338315.pdf.

Measuring Intangibles in Brazil

• Speaker: Mark A. Dutz (Worldbank)
• Paper by Sergio Kannebley, Maira Scarpelli, Siddharth Sharma
• Intangibles as a "new source of growth" in developing countries
• Biggest gaps in comparison Brasil vs. US: scientific&R&D, brand equity, form-specific human capital, organizational structure
• WAVES partnership (Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services)

Innovation Platform Building – Intangible Agenda and Economic Growth

• Speaker: Yoshiaki Tojo (New Energy&Industrial Technology Development Organization, NEDO)
• Intangible asset types (micro level): machinery&equipment, software&databases, R&D and other intellectual property products and brand equity/firm-specific human capital, organizational capital
• Intangible asset types (makro level): economic competences, innovative properties and computerized information
• Bibliometric analysis in academic landscape of innovation resarch done by Sakata et al (2011)
• Open innovation system between research centers and firms (foto)
• Innovation platform building as "knowledge-creation community" with social network service in the cloud + data dissemination (data.gov)
• New Science&Technology Basic Plan (STI, 2012-2017) with social goals (green, life, resilience) and an open forum
• Startup accelerator platform as "Ba" for business planning and networking with firms, universities, VCs and financing agencies as actors

The UK Programme

• Speaker: Tony Clayton (Chief economist, IPO)
• Design is the biggest intangible asset, followed by software
• Citation of the Prime Minister: "The current intellectual property framework might not be sufficiently well designed to promote INNOVATION and GROWTH in the UK"
• New books from Amazon warehouse by decade analysis by Paul Heald, University of Illinois (2012)
• Digital Copyright Exchange – simple copyright system
• Details of UK IPO research at http://www.ipo.gov.uk/pro-ipresearch.htm

Coffee Break

In the coffee break I have been interviewed by PhD students from Université Paris Sud in the little recreation area of Worldbank. I will post a link to the video as soon as it’s online (by the way: Peter Pawlowsky shot this picture with my camera so who has the IP? :-)

Virtual Assets as new Knowledge Assets

• Speaker: from Korean Development Institute
• Virtual asset: property right is assigned to a specific person (avatar)
• Relations of real person/avatar and real/virtual currency
• Virtual assets are almost always traded in online games
• 45% of the korean population are gamers
• White paper on Korean gaming industry (2010)
• Roles: seller, buyer, brokerage service (like Paypal)

Intangible Investment at Industry Level

• Speaker: Hyunbae Chun (Sogan University)
• CHS definition of intangibles: computerized information (CI, mainly software), innovative property (IP, scientific/non-scientific R&D), economic competencies (EC, brand equity)
• Coinvest project for European Countries (Haskel)
• 27 industry classification is used
• Scientific R&D and computerized information as main drivers
• Industrialization in Korea started as late as 1960

Some Concepts and Examples of Platforms & Distributed Innovation

• Speaker: Kevin Boudreau (London Business School)
• Moving from products to platforms
• Different design approaches: open platform marketplace (iTunes), community distribution (F/OSS), contests (Kaggle), system integration (Renault), multi-sided platforms (Amazon), crowdfunding (Sellaband), user-generated content platform (Youtube)
• "No matter who you are most of the smartest people work for someone else"
• Harvard Medical School "Big Data" Genomics Problem (Boudreau,  Lakhani, Guinan) with two week long competition and $ 2.000,- on TopCoder.com
• Boudreau, K.: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom? An Early Look at Large Numbers of Software App Developers and Patterns of Innovations

Combinatoric Innovation – Environments for Mobilisation of Intellectual Capital

• Speaker: Paul Louise Iske (Maastricht University)
• Next Generation Bank
• Keywords associated with future proof organizations: creativity, outward looking, customer focus
• Creativity score vs. age and the age of "terminal seriousness" (personal remark: we have that slide in our training material since 8 yrs as well)
• Innovation environments should consist of 4 spaces: process space, social space, virtual space and physical space (personal remark: +1 +1 +1 for that)
• Environments for Innovations (Leadbeater): diversity (most important), selection, perpetuation, co-evolution, unlearning, disruption, simplicity, spare capacity, timing
• Example Dialogues House
• From "If we build it, they will use it" to "When they use it, it will build itself"
• Institute of brilliant failures
• What would an Intellectual Capital Bank look like?
• Examples: Innocentive, Kickstarter (TikTok + LunaTik, watch with iPod nano inside), Seeds (social entrepreneurs)
• Serendipity is a crucial business process
• FAILURE IS AN OPTION!

Open Innovation Practices in Germany, Switzerland and Austria

• Speaker: Ellen Enkel (Zeppelin University, Editor of R&D Management Journal)
• Open innovation activities trends: customer integration, lead user integration, supplier integration, knowledge networks
• Most of open innovation activities are done with customers and suppliers
• Insight: companies are not thinking of universities as open innovation partners
• Sources of knowledge for innovation: COMPANY – knowledge we have (employees), COMMUNITY – people we know (customers, supplier, partner), CROWD – people we don’t know (public)
• Case: Beiersdorf has a virtual trusted network with briefings for open innovation
• Why do companies conduct open innovation: 2/3 innovation oriented and 1/3 efficiency oriented (a third pillar will be marketing/PR oriented)
• Three Strategic options: defender (Mibelle AG), analyser (Beiersdorf AG), prospector (D. Swarovski KG)

Designing the 2020 Enterprise

• Speaker: Ahmed Bounfour
• ISD Program was initiated by CIGREF representing CIOs from more then 100 french companies
• From lean production to "acceluction"

Designing and governing a Campus of the Future

• Speaker: Dominique Vernay (President Paris-Saclay Campus)
• Saclay is in the south of Paris, focus is on mathematics and physics
• Little cooperation between the mixed research units because of large area (e.g. 10 km between INRA and Ecole Polytechnique)
• 1999 creation of optics valley
• 2005 setting up the systematic competitiveness initiative (innovation cluster focused on ICT)
• 2009 NanoINNOV initiative related to nanotechnologies
• Future investments: Labex, equipex, cohortes, SATT, IRT, IEED, IDEX
• 8 graduate schools are moving to Saclay between 2012-2017
• Companies like Microsoft, Danone and Thales are also located on the campus
• In the Top 10 of shanghai level
• Research organized by crossing scientific fields with societal challenges

Patent licensing and open innovation at L’Oréal

• Speaker: Frédéric Caillaud (L’Oréal, Licensing and Business Development Director)
• 90000 products in the portfolio segmented in hair and skin applications, 4000 new formulations/year
• More than 50% of the innovation is coming from the outside
• Almost 240 partnerships
• Innovation space navigation tool: sector, field, company, departement, researcher
• Innovation tool by Thomson Reuters with 60 million patents each represented by a vecor

How does a large Company practice Open Innovation at a Global Scale

• Speaker: Isabelle Wuest (Saint-Gobain)
• 42 Mrd. € Umsatz, 195.000 employees, three sectors (innovative maaterials, construction products, building distribution)
• 3.500 employees are working in R&D (France, US, China)
• 4 tools for open innovation: NOVA (Techno-Marketing & Start-Ups, team with 10-15 people), SUN (Saint-Gobain University Network), Partnership (around 60 partners in 2011, Not-Invented-Here as hurdle) and Domolab (innovation center)
• Domolab is for the exchange with architects, influencers etc.

Innovation Policy Platform

• Speaker: Dominique Guellec (OECD)
• The three layers of the platform: information repository, network of nodes and search/navigation layer
• Platform prototype can be seen at http://panlogic.co.uk/oecd-ipp-v9/Home.htm

One further remark: if you are interested in my notes from last year’s IC7 you can find it in an older blog post.