Introducing Open Innovation to Universities : How to Increase Universities Innovativeness

In order to react to increasing competition for new students, European universities need to become more attractive and listen to the demands of their students. Open Innovation has proven to be an effective way for the integration of new stakeholders into innovation processes and increase innovativeness. This paper describes the application of a framework for the design of Collective Intelligence task to an Open Innovation context. We will show how the framework supports the conceptual design of an idea generation process for a virtual ideas community platform for a German university. The process will account for the specific environment of public universities and the demands of their students. The paper shows that the framework for Collective Intelligence is also applicable to crowdsourced Open Innovation activities like idea generation.