In our Special Report (below) this week we look at the question:  What does the future of innovation look like?

 

It's not the big, internal corporate R&D approach of the bygone Bell Labs days, that's for sure. To innovate and achieve technology advances today, in any field, requires an open approach to research and development and knowledge exchange and a willingness, and ability, to engage in multidisciplinary and heterogeneous resource sharing on a global scale, across a wide range of customer and other partnerships.

In the consumer world the open innovation model most often referenced is the Procter & Gamble (P&G) approach to R&D. But what happens when the open innovation model is embraced by a country, or a region?

The Next Silicon Valley found the answer to that question in Europe last week in the Flanders region of Belgium. There, in the quaint city of Leuven, and in nearby Eindoven, The Netherlands, and in Brussels, we saw and heard first-hand how the imec model of open, partner-based innovation has put tiny little Flanders at the center of the open innovation universe.

 

It's not a tune that will play well in Silicon Valley, or certainly Southern California, but the fact is that imec's public-private partnership model for advanced R&D is a proven success. It's a success not just for its partners, like Intel and a long list of other global tech companies that depend on the R&D results it generates, but it's also a success for the Flanders region, one that might show the rest of the world how to turn the open innovation, public-private partnership model into an engine for generating regional wealth.