Rafael Nadal
Retired Professional Tennis Player; Former World #1, 22-Time Grand Slam Champion
Father of Open Innovation | Maire Tecnimont Professor, Luiss University | Founding Director, Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation, UC Berkeley Haas
Henry Chesbrough is the world's leading authority on open innovation, a paradigm he created that has transformed corporate R&D and technology strategy globally. Cited by over 133,000 scholars, his frameworks guide Fortune 500 leaders in leveraging external partnerships for growth. Audiences gain actionable strategies for building innovation ecosystems and turning collaboration into competitive advantage.
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Innovation speaker Henry Chesbrough is the world’s foremost authority on open innovation, a groundbreaking paradigm he introduced that has reshaped how organizations create and capture value from technology. As the Maire Tecnimont Professor of Open Innovation and Sustainability at Luiss University in Rome and Founding Faculty Director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Chesbrough bridges academic rigor with real-world impact across two continents.
Chesbrough earned his economics degree at Yale University before completing an MBA at Stanford University and a PhD in business administration at UC Berkeley. Before entering academia, he gained hands-on industry experience in marketing at Quantum Corporation and served on the faculty of Harvard Business School. This combination of corporate practice and scholarly depth gives his insights an unusual authority that resonates with executive audiences worldwide.
His landmark book Open Innovation introduced the concept that companies should leverage both internal and external ideas to advance their technology, rather than relying solely on in-house R&D. Subsequent works, including Open Business Models, Open Services Innovation, and The Oxford Handbook of Open Innovation, have expanded and deepened this framework. His scholarship has been cited by over 133,000 researchers, placing him among the most influential management thinkers of his generation. The European Commission recognized his contributions with the Innovation Luminary Award.
Today, Chesbrough’s work has evolved to encompass open innovation at ecosystem scale, focusing on how industries, regions, and societies can co-create shared value through collaborative governance. His partnership with Maire Tecnimont at Luiss University reflects his growing emphasis on integrating sustainability into innovation strategy, helping organizations align profitable growth with environmental responsibility.
As a speaker, Henry Chesbrough delivers thought-provoking keynotes that equip leaders with actionable frameworks for harnessing external knowledge, building collaborative ecosystems, and turning innovation into sustainable competitive advantage.
Organizations can no longer rely solely on internal R&D to stay competitive. In this keynote, Henry Chesbrough presents his foundational framework for open innovation, showing how companies can systematically identify, evaluate, and integrate external ideas, technologies, and talent into their innovation pipelines. Drawing on case studies from global corporations, he explains how to build the organizational structures, incentive systems, and cultural mindsets that enable effective collaboration with startups, universities, and cross-industry partners. Leaders leave with a practical roadmap for transforming their innovation processes from closed silos into dynamic, externally connected engines of growth.
As economies shift from product-centric to service-centric models, companies must fundamentally rethink how they create and deliver value. Chesbrough demonstrates how open innovation combined with a services approach unlocks powerful new business models, enabling organizations to co-create solutions with customers and partners rather than pushing finished products to market. He explores how platform-based thinking, data-driven services, and ecosystem partnerships allow companies to generate recurring revenue streams and deepen customer relationships in ways that pure product strategies cannot achieve.
Open innovation has evolved beyond bilateral partnerships between individual firms. In this forward-looking keynote, Chesbrough explores how entire industries, regions, and societies can orchestrate innovation ecosystems that generate shared value. He examines the governance structures, incentive designs, and trust-building mechanisms that make collaborative ecosystems work, with particular attention to how sustainability goals can be integrated into innovation strategy. Audiences gain a strategic perspective on aligning profitable growth with environmental and social responsibility through collective action.
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