The Stanford Social Innovation Review just published an article on “Open Innovation: A Muse for Scaling” – Good chances, that this paper will become my personal “favorite article of 2012”. Why? Well, the paper manages to explain in just two pages and in plain words, why open innovation has the potential to drastically increase the […]
Bas van Abel, head of the design lab at waag society, Netherlands had a great session where he spoke about empowering people and fixing our economy by moving to open peer-to-peer production communities. He gave examples of concrete work with miners in Congo, and prosthesis-makers in Indonesia. Bas starts with a quote from Oscar […]
So re:publica 2012 has started today. Not only with a call for freedom by Harvards Eben Moglen, but also with an interesting talk on ‘open innovation and the contribution of non-experts’ by Beth Kolko. Here’s my summary of it: For Beth, non-experts have the skills to innovate, but lack the recognition and credentials by institutions. […]
Just found an interesting TV show on “African Innovation” aired by Al Jazeera three days ago. They make several points e.g: ” Across Africa, developers and programmers are coming up with new technologies from mobile banking to mapping software and medical tablets to cloud storage. Now the continent is increasingly relying on its own homegrown […]
This is an interesting call by the “Open African Innovation Research and Training” inititative, which is part of the GIZ commons@ip programme, which I run: “The Open A.I.R. initiative on the role of intellectual property (IP) in open development invites applications for a three- or six-month Research Fellowship to work in Cape Town, South Africa, […]
Just released: an IT sector promotion manual and toolbox with many examples and tools pertaining to OpenIT@giz – Open Innovation for Development such as capacity building, open innovation methods, training-of-trainer networks in IT, Open Source etc. Check it out! BTW: It is drawing on the ict@innovation programme and other programmes described here). And for archival […]
The working group on ‘Promoting Innovation Systems’ of Germany’s development cooperation just published a documentation on “Strengthening Innovation Systems in the Context of Development Cooperation”. An article by Balthas Seibold gives an overview of the potential of open innovation for developing countries. Taking the capacity building programme commons@ip as an example, the paper enumerates important […]
This biennium’s Idlelo (four) conference on Open Source and the Digital Commons in Africa organized by FOSSFA had the theme of “Development with ownership” and took place in Accra, Ghana from 17.04-21.04. Balthas Seibold was there to launch with FOSSFA a training book resulting of the joint regional capacity building programme “ict@innovation – creating business […]
Germany’s international Development + Cooperation Journal just published an article by Balthas Seibold, which looks at open innovation and the knowledge commons in the framework of business development in developing countries. The piece argues, that innovation is key to private sector development, so stringent protection of intellectual property rights can hamper businesses in poor countries. […]
While most technology conferences happen as swanky, slick, and well-rehearsed events, the recently concluded Asia Source 3 took the opposite track and ran a camp that was spartan yet spontaneous. From November 7 to 12, 2009, Asia Source 3 gathered 150 representatives from Southeast Asia to discuss developments in open source. For those six days, […]
Innovation: What role for ICTs and for Open approaches? This has been a guiding question for a joint talk by gtz’s Thorsten Scherf and InWEnt’s Balthas Seibold at a symposium and seminar organized in Dortmund for gtz staff and other experts on innovation systems promotion. Balthas Seibold pointed out, how we might be moving from […]
Free digital knowledge! claims the German Coalition for Action “Copyright for Education and Research”. These days, Germany is debating new legislation for copyright in the digital era – a proposed text passed the executive branch of government in March of this year. A nationwide coalition of research and educational organizations and personalities fights the proposal, […]