Below are my thoughts after a meeting with the Director of IP Services at Coventry University.
This lead to some contacts for requirements gathering, for the different stakeholders: academics, students, Coventry University business managers and outside companies.
The main aim of the market place is to create a web portal for innovation ideas exchange, where the whole process will be in one place:
– It will allow different levels of disclosure / IP protection
– It will allow different levels of public dissemination
– It will allow searching for collaborators
– It will allow the business managers to engage with ideas early
– We will investigate a linking the marketplace to commercial viability “tools” (these tools are not fully automatic but will use some data from the marketplace )
– An additional benefit is the ability to pull out stats for reporting:
Who virtual environments will be used is not entirely clear but it was suggested that some case studies of routes to market for typical services, products and designs could be showcased in a virtual environment.
The project also leads to the following research questions:
– What are the requirements for a social open innovation marketplace which allows the university and companies to co-innovate
– What are the attitudes of different stakeholder groups towards the use of virtual worlds for the full market place vs. case studies vs. no use of virtual worlds at all
– How well do the different levels of disclosure / IP work. Which levels are the most popular and is there any correlation between disclosure level and the amount of people that have looked at, commented on or engaged with an idea?
The project faces a few technical challenges, mainly about linking systems together:
– Connecting to Coventry University systems, so that all academics (other staff and possibly students too) can login with the University account and information from their profile will be available in the marketplace
– Linking the marketplace to the BRAIN connect app for partner search
– Linking the marketplace to the commercial viability assessment tools
There are different ways these technical challenges can be overcome. (E.g. directly accessing databases, tight integration within the source code of the different apps, using web services etc.) The most important step is to establish contact with the relevant people, in order to discuss which ways work for them.
Dr Maurice Hendrix
Open Innovation Exchange (OpEx) 