Open Innovation Alliances and Communities in Higher Education

This study develops an extended taxonomy of innovation types by actor and learning type. The concepts of invention and collaborative and networked innovations are extended to crowd innovations, which is a new concept. The study introduces open innovation alliances and communities to promote innovations in higher education and presents a stakeholder map for such open innovation alliances and communities. Empirical evidence is presented from a European innovation alliance, which has been favorable for promoting research and development projects and student and staff exchanges in higher education. Empirical evidence is also presented from innovation communities, where crowdsourcing is used to search and evaluate new ideas. Finally, these ideas are forwarded for further development and implementation to produce crowd innovations