Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum

February 28, 2008 Program:

Open Innovation is a new model of innovation, in which companies utilize more external ideas in their own innovation process, and let unused internal ideas be used by others on the outside. This has been a very successful approach for companies like IBM and Procter and Gamble. But what about smaller companies? What opportunities are there for startups and other innovative companies from Open Innovation? Our panel of three successful participants in the Open Innovation ecosystem bring many years of experience with them to address this question.

Professor Henry Chesbrough, the author of the award-winning book, Open Innovation, will moderate the panel.

Our panel will include:

Alpheus Bingham is a member of the Board of Directors and co-founder of InnoCentive, Inc. He has been a strong advocate of open innovation and founded InnoCentive, Inc., along with other ventures that create the advantages of open and networked organizational structures, including: YourEncore, Inc., Coalesix, Inc., Maaguzi, Inc., Indigo Biosystems, Seriosity, Chorus and Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Fast Track Systems, Inc., and Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. Dr. Bingham was the recipient of the Economist's Fourth Annual Innovation Summit "Business Process Award" for InnoCentive. He was also named as one of Project Management Institute's "Power 50" leaders in October 2005. Dr. Bingham had over 25 years of experience with Eli Lilly and Company in pharmaceutical research and development, research acquisitions and collaborations, portfolio management and R&D strategic planning. He received a B.S. in chemistry from Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Stanford University.

Dr. David Tennenhouse is a Partner at New Venture Partners. He joined New Venture Partners when it opened its Silicon Valley office in 2007. He is focused on developing relationships with corporate and government-funded R&D teams. David joined New Venture Partners from Amazon.com, where he was Vice President of Platform Strategy and CEO of its A9.com subsidiary. Prior to Amazon/A9, David was Vice President and Director of Research at Intel Corporation, where he pioneered an "open collaborative" approach to corporate research. This was, in part, based on his earlier work as DARPA's Chief Scientist and Director of its Information Technology Office. At both DARPA and Intel, David was involved in the strategic planning and execution of programs related to a wide range of technologies, including networking, wireless communications, computer architecture, distributed computing, machine learning, search / data mining, image processing, robotics, MEMs, healthcare, and nano/bio-technology. He has held academic appointments at MIT in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and in the Sloan School of Management. He holds a B.A.Sc. and M.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto and obtained his Ph.D. at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge.

Jonathan Spier is CEO and Co-Founder of NetBase (formerly Accelovation). Jonathan leads the company’s business and sales strategy. His leadership has helped the company transition from a start-up to a world-class software provider that helps solve some of the most complex innovation problems faced by the Fortune 500. Prior to Accelovation, Jonathan worked for Ariba where he managed teams responsible for the core technology underlying Ariba’s business-to-business e-commerce platform. He also managed several key partner relationships. Jonathan holds an MBA with Distinction from the Harvard Business School and a BA in computer science with honors from UC Berkeley.

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