Social Lives
Author: Dr Nicola Mountford, Assistant Professor, School of Business, Maynooth University
Opening Doors is a collaborative, interdisciplinary, intersectoral and international learning experience for early career researchers in Open Science and Open Innovation – applicable to all academic disciplines. As the project to develop and pilot this learning experience draws to a close, I reflect on my own learning experience as one of the principal investigators within the consortium.
Opening Doors, is an EU-funded co-ordination action aimed to research and develop a learning experience and networking opportunity for early career researchers using open, online resources. Specifically, our proposal said that we would focus on open science and open innovation. The first time our consortium met – Maynooth University (MU), Aarhus University (Denmark), the National Training Fund (Czech Republic), and UCD (Lead) – we spent a surprising amount of time discussing what open science and open innovation meant to the various partners. Coming from the School of Business, I had a good sense of what was meant by open innovation – as Chesbrough put it, “a more distributed, more participatory, more decentralized approach to innovation”. When it came to defining open science, however, I struggled. Following the definition of open innovation, open science presumably indicated a more distributed, more participatory, more decentralized approach to science. But, when we speak of open innovation, we tend to see industry-based innovators reaching into academia and across the general public. Open science seemed to require that we academics return the favour.
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