The Open Innovation Exchange Platform: Experiences of Implementing a Business Community Engagement Platform for Channeling IP Development and Collaboration with Local Businesses

The Open Innovation Exchange Program (OpEx) is an online market place for Business Community Engagement, which encourages collaboration on innovative products and services. Individual participants are able to set their dissemination level keeping their Intellectual Property safe, while still enabling collaborations between Coventry University academics and businesses. The project will implement the web based market place and also integrate immersive virtual technologies where appropriate. The platform is currently being rolled out across Coventry University, the Times Higher Education award winning ´Entrepreneurial University of the Year of 2011. This paper describes the experiences of implementing the marketplace for business community engagement in Coventry. It shows preliminary studies on the use of different technologies, describes the development of the platform and describes a preliminary evaluation of its effectiveness and how it can support Open Innovation and foster IP creation.