John Hagel and Henry Chesbrough deliver keynote addresses at "The Shape of Things to Come" conference

"The Shape of Things to Come," a conference presented by the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship on January 17-18, 2008, featured keynotes by John Hagel, co-author of The Only Sustainable Edge and Co-Chairman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation, and Dr. Henry Chesbrough, Executive Director of the Center for Open Innovation at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and author of Open Innovation.

The keynotes bookended Thursday's forum, "New Patterns and Paradigms in Global Innovation Networks," and were a prelude to Friday's academic workshop, "A Global Perspective on Regional Innovation Indicators." Hagel's talk focused on the need for a more explicit taxonomy of innovative collaboration and discussed the "huge need to define pragmatic migration paths"--routes that the average manager and company can take to reach the opportunities that normally are only accessible to cutting-edge companies.

The forum closed with a presentation by Dr. Henry Chesbrough, who provided an overview on the globalization of innovation in the Chinese semiconductor industry, which he sees as split into a "globally oriented, globally competitive" industry segment and a domestically-oriented segment with "backward technologies" and lacking access to capital. The question, he explained, is how China will shift its resources, now entrenched in the latter, to the former, competitive segment.

Chesbrough finished with a discussion of intellectual property rights (IPR) in China, looking at flows of knowledge and current IPR challenges; he mentioned some surprising developments--the rise of businesses to "promote the legal exchange of IP" and the growth of a domestic constituency for stronger IPR--and discussed future implications for IPR in China.

In between the keynotes, the forum featured sessions on innovation in internet services in China, the role of venture capital as a network builder, and discussions on two rapidly moving industries: cleantech and thin film transistor LCD displays.

Conference materials, including presentations and audio files, will be made available on the SPRIE website.