From May 8-10, the OIS Research Conference 2023 took place as a hybrid event at the Impact Hub in Vienna, and what a wonderful experience it was! With 70 in-person and more than 200 online participants, the conference was packed with stimulating discussions and interactive sessions that shed new light on processes, effects and boundary conditions of openness and collaboration in science.
Scholars from different disciplines presented 27 research projects on different OIS topics such as science-industry linkages, inter- and transdisciplinary research collaborations, open data infrastructures or perspectives on crowd science and six OIS cases on novel OIS applications in different fields of research throughout the three conference days. On top of the paper and case presentations, conference participants engaged in specific sessions designed around this year’s special conference theme: Synergies and tensions around impact: How does OIS come into play? In these sessions, we critically reflected upon the influence of openness and collaboration on achieving scientific and societal impact. Do OIS practices promote societal impact at the expense of scientific productivity? Or, do they help us to achieve both and, if so, under what conditions?
A keynote speech by Matt Marx (Cornell University) kicked-off the conference by raising the question of how open data can influence synergies and tensions around productivity in science and generating innovation. The speech sparked a lively debate on the merits and challenges of open data sharing and reusing, and introduced a newly open available dataset on patent-paper-pairs.
Like every year, the OIS experiment in which participants “walk the talk” by experimenting with OIS approaches was another conference highlight: divided into six groups, attendees compared the scientific and societal impact of published research that did – or did not – apply different OIS mechanisms such as crowd science, co-creation with patients, and academia-industry collaborations. We also explored boundary conditions that appear to shape scientists’ ability to use OIS practices for both scientific and societal impact. Along the way, the experiment pushed participants to discuss and (dis)agree on definitions and measurement of different types of impact.
An OIS debate – co-sponsored with AoMs TIM Division – featured a distinguished panel of speakers including Michaël Bikard (INSEAD), Aled Edwards (Structural Genomics Consortium), Dilek Fraisl (IIASA), and Michelle Gittelman (Rutgers Business School). The panelists highlighted both benefits and challenges arising from OIS practices such as open data and citizen involvement in research, often drawing on first-hand insights from their own research and practice. At times, the debate sparked passionate and heated exchanges – revealing both the tensions inherent in this year’s special conference topic but also the opportunities arising from studying OIS using different disciplinary lenses.
The OIS Research Conference Report highlights the two sessions, OIS Experiment and OIS Debate, which specifically addressed the Special Theme of the 2023 conference: “Synergies and Tensions around Impact: How does Open Innovation in Science (OIS) come into play?”.
A big thank you to all the participants for making the OIS Research Conference 2023 a memorable experience, providing everyone with a lot of food for thought on how to (differently) think about the impact of science and inspiring many ideas for new research projects related to understanding the boundary conditions and effects of openness and collaboration in scientific research.
The organizing committee 2022
