On February 26-27, the 2nd annual Open Innovation Conference was held at The Venetian in Las Vegas. Darin Eich was there for Open Innovators and blogged about the conference. To roundup, a list of Darin’s posts:

• Attending the Open Innovation Conference
• Live from the Open Innovation Conference
• Great day at the conference
• Insights And Themes From Presentations
• Sources of Innovation: Where do ideas & innovation come from?
• How Really Big Companies Open Innovate
• The Need for Innovation Teams and Internal Consultants within Organizations
• Becoming an Open Innovation Partner with Large Companies

Thanks Darin! I hope to be there too next year.

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About 3 weeks ago I sat together with Andy Zynga, CEO Europe of NineSigma. For those that may not know the company: NineSigma is an open innovation intermediary that matches the technology needs and questions from companies (referred to as Innovation Seekers) with the possible solutions from a huge network of scientists, university researchers and technology incubators (referred to as Solution Providers). As such they directly compete with other intermediaries like Innocentive, TekScout and YourEncore. NineSigma claims to have the largest amount of Requests For Proposals (RFPs) on its platform and thus to be the market leader. Their clients include companies like P&G, Xerox, Kimberly-Clark and DuPont.

I had a very nice chat with Andy Zynga about their expansion strategy in Europe (NineSigma is headquartered in the US and has already expanded to Japan with a local office there). In order to broaden the current client base in Europe, they are now building up a European Office in the area of Louvain (Belgium). On average NineSigma plans to double its business year by year as more and more companies are adopting this kind of open innovation initiatives. If you are interested in their services or just want to know more, references to the newly founded European Office can be found here.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with the Stephen Bailey, the marketing and communications director at Fluevog Shoes about their open source footwear project.

How did the idea for the open source footwear initiative come about? When did it start and what was the inspiration?
For years, when john visited other stores and was on the floor, or even out for dinner people would give him their drawing of their perfect shoe. John lost many of these - so the web was an ideal place to collect them, but also showcase them. It started 6 years ago.

I noticed you mentioned “this ain’t no contest - this is open source footwear.” I’m curious, how you distinguish between the two?
People aren’t competing against each other for a prize - sometimes, nothing quite works for us (but of course may later which is why we keep it all up). Truth is, it’s not the perfect use of the term open source either - but we did get the blessing of the godfather of the real open source which you can find on our site.

It may later? What do you mean?
Yeah, sometimes a shoe is submitted and although it might not work for us at the time, a few years later it fits into one of our lines.

Do you publish all the submissions? If so, why? (I have my hunches, but I’m curious).
Truth is, we turn away very few - we have no request for age, so if a 4 year old submits a drawing, we want it up there. Plus, we are an inconclusive fluevocracy of inclusion. We are the brand owned by fluevogers - if you’re a fluevoger and post a picture - up it goes - it would be unfair otherwise).

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