Building an open innovation program between universities and corporate partners in Brazil through an online entrepreneurship platform

Abstract

Coined in 2003 by Henry Chesbrough, the concept of open innovation consists in the idea that innovation can also take place outside the company, either with start-ups, students, professors, and others. It can be developed in many different ways, including open innovation programs with university students, seen as a group always up to date with new trends and technologies. However, there are many bureaucracies involving the partnership between these two stakeholders. Therefore, a need arises to try to reduce these bureaucratic issues and allow the development of innovative ideas of products and services to companies. In order to do so, this thesis included extensive research about the insights of the stakeholders involved through eighteen interviews as well as the related literature to develop a blended open innovation program applicable to Brazilian universities and companies. As a country with great potential to innovation, Brazil was chosen due to the lack of well established programs of this kind with potential to scale. When talking about scalability, it is important that the program is supported by a platform with capability to allow the interaction between stakeholders, with Venturely being the chosen one for this purpose. The results of this dissertation contributed to the creation of a synthetized prototype of a blended open innovation program between companies and universities in Brazil.

Date of Award	24 Jan 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	René Bohnsack (Supervisor)