Team

 The Founders and Managing Partners of OpenInnovation.eu have gained wide scientific experience in the field of Open Innovation as well as field experience as entrepreneurs, in strategic consultancy and as vivid speakers on top-level events world-wide.

Prof. dr. Ir. Vareska van de Vrande

Vareska currently works as a full Professor of Collaborative Innovation and Business Venturing at the Rotterdam School of Management. Her research on open innovation focuses on the use of different organizational forms for external technology sourcing, such as corporate venture capital investments, strategic alliances, joint ventures, and mergers and acquisitions. In addition, Vareska is also the director of the Part-time PhD Programme in Management at RSM, a visiting professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and a certified LEGO SERIOUS PLAY facilitator.

Ir. Jan Spruijt

Jan is a senior manager at Vodafone Group. Jan has worked for 13 years as a Program Director and Senior Lecturer in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Avans University. Furthermore, Jan is founder and director at Innovative Dutch, developer of the Innovation Management Game and Business Model Game in the field of innovation management and entrepreneurship. In 2023, he published the book “Innographics: A Visual Guide to Innovation Management” He has been spotlighted as a keynote speaker at a wide range of events worldwide as a public speaker.

Dr. Maurice de Rochemont

Maurice holds a PhD in Innovation Sciences and is a senior lecturer at Rotterdam School of Management and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Maurice is founder and CEO of Ads Ventures. Ads Ventures won the FD Gazelle Award both in 2015 and 2016. His research focuses on the success factors for innovation in multi-partner alliances (clusters, networks). Other research interests inclde open innovation and corporate venturing. Maurice is also a board member of ASAP Netherlands (Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals, www.strategic-alliances.nl) and a board member of the ECIS Phd council.

Partners

Prof. dr. Henry Chesbrough
(University of Berkeley, Haas Business School)

His unique background as both a practitioner and a researcher has made Henry Chesbrough one of the most innovative and respected authorities on how to get ideas to market. In his book Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, Henry defines the trends that are restructuring r&d worldwide and he proposes new approaches to innovation strategy. Henry Chesbrough is a professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas Business School, where he teaches and runs a center on managing innovation and the management of technology and researches in the areas of managing innovation, corporate venture capital, spin-offs, and managing intellectual property. His book Open Innovation describes a trend that is reshaping how organizations structure innovation processes: an accelerating shift from a “closed” innovation model, in which research and development is vertically integrated within organizations, to an “open model” in which firms learn to use ideas wherever they find them in a flexible business model that’s open to a broad range of arrangements. Chesbrough’s comprehensive approach focuses on both the internal factors and the external trends that shape a company’s innovation success. Open innovation leverages the knowledge available outside the organization to the company’s advantage, as venture capitalists do. It also opens up the barriers that usually keep innovations developed internally from benefiting other business units in the company and it encourages companies to develop new ways to share ideas externally for profit.