This Norwegian-run Entrepreneurship and Innovation seminar held in Silicon Valley is a gathering of business developers, strategists, IT-persons, marketers and entrepreneurs who are involved with innovation projects or processes.
Best Practice and Emerging Trends 2013
The program focuses on designing innovation strategies to enable both mainstream and new companies to take advantage of best practice and emerging insights on innovation.
The program explores new paths to commercialization. Fostering innovation and avoiding its potentially disruptiv or challenging effects requires a new understanding of business models. This is true for companies whether they extend their business to the Internet to a large or small degree.
As Silicon Valley is a unique place, being one of the most innovative regions in the world, one cannot ‘import’ Silicon Valley to Europe or to any other geographic region, not even in the U.S. However, you as business professionals can learn from Silicon Valley’s best practice and emerging trends and implement new strategies in your own companies and organizations. Our set of US presenters are knowledgeable about Scandinavian business.
Who should attend?
The seminar is explicitly designed to address the needs of professionals in business development, innovation, marketing, technology and strategy who work on innovation projects or processes:
- Business strategists, Product managers, Business developers in established companies, Innovation managers, eCommerce and Internet marketing developers, CEOs, CTOs and IT managers, Companies and organizations tracking emergent innovations, Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, Customer relationship managers
Why attend this seminar:
- Get insights about best practice and emerging trends in innovation
- Get updated insights about application of technology
- Find out how you can use the power of innovation
- Meet managers and visit competence centers
- Experience the dynamic culture of Silicon Valley first hand.
- Attend presentations at the Berkeley campus - University of California
- Expand your professional network
Focus area
One part of the program (2 days) addresses the link between innovative ideas and their implementation. Here you will get an overview of the trends and best practice in various industries in Silicon Valley. Each day and topic includes various speakers and/or company visits.
Prominent academics and practitioners from well-known companies present common challenges, and what it takes to successfully develop, implement, and commercialize innovations. Participants will also attend informal networking events designed to share their experiences with colleagues from a broad range of industries.
Focus track: Service Innovation Strategies
The second part of the program we focus on Service Innovation Strategies.
The best companies innovate to position themselves with new capabilities and approaches to move ahead of their competition. Service innovation has become vitally important. Even in traditional manufacturing or product industries, service innovation has become a key competitive differentiator to move companies beyond commodity businesses by wrapping a value-added services layer around the core product.
A new discipline of service innovation has emerged that draws key distinctions from traditional models of product innovation and reveals new skills, techniques, business models and organizational frameworks.
Some of the key topics covered in Service Innovation Strategies include:
- Understanding the nature of innovation, why it’s critical for businesses but difficult to achieve
- Explaining how service innovation is distinct from product innovation
- Examining innovative services-based business models, and analyzing the attributes of successful business models and how companies develop them
- Crafting strategies for achieving service innovation in companies;
- Learning how to motivate and equip your employees and organizations with the skills to drive innovation.
- The 2013 Service Innovation Strategies track will consist of site visits to leading innovative service corporations in the San Francisco Bay Area, a set of course materials teaching key aspects of service innovation, and time to apply frameworks, strategies, and lessons learned from the site visits and course materials to participants’ own service innovation initiatives or challenges. The focus track part of the program looks at innovation in services.
Academic Responsible
Associate Professor Peder Inge Furseth.
Furseth is an Associate Professor at the Department of Innovation and Economic Organisation at BI Norwegian School of Management. Furseth has successfully presented the annual Innovation and eBusiness conference in San Francisco since 1999. His focus of research is eBusiness in retailing and banking.
