CSPC 2017

Panel Organizer: Tiberius Brastaviceanu, ACES-CAKE

Canada hosts some of the most ambitious pilot projects in open science and open innovation. The problem is that all these initiatives are poorly known and understood, especially those that did not emerge within traditional institutions, which are in fact the most disruptive ones. In this Case Study panel we discuss a few special open science projects that have originated within open innovation networks, and have been conducted in collaboration with forward-looking academic labs. The panelists will present the methodologies, the infrastructure for collaboration and the governance that have been employed, the resulting benefits, and will analyse some of the problems encountered. These cases constitute a great example of how academia can interface with open networks and communities.

Online communities and networks have become environments buzzing with scientific and technological activities. It is nowadays normal for a graduate student to work in a lab by day and contribute to online communities by night, or spend their evenings in open innovation spaces such as fablabs, makerspaces, and hackerspaces. It is also not a secret any more that students turn to their online peers for technical questions and advice, rather than to their lab colleagues and professors. The most prolific students are those who maintain complex relationships outside of the immediate academic circle. The boundaries of academia are becoming very fuzzy, but there is very little effort to formalize these exchanges between academic labs and online communities/networks, and open innovation spaces.

The cases that will be presented and discussed during this panel will show how interfaces between academia and open innovation communities/networks accelerate scientific discovery and technological transfer.

By presenting and discussing these cases we hope to stimulate other labs to experiment with relations with open innovation networks. At a higher level, we also hope to influence Universities to put in place pilot programs to begin formalizing these kind of relations. SENSORICA affiliates can work with different academic players to transfer their knowledge and know how.