This past week I attended a workshop hosted by Swissnex Boston, an initiative of the Swiss embassy, in which the challenges of building innovation partnerships were discussed. Entitled “Open Innovation to Innovation Partnerships – A new paradigm in a troubled economy,” it was a successful event (IMHO) mostly because there was an appropriate mix of large companies, SMEs, academics and service providers. My experience has been that companies pursuing open innovation benefit more by talking to SMEs and universities than like-sized peers since the latter just propel big-company self-absorption and bureaucracy that are the bane of successful innovation strategies. (more…)