The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) can be considered as a strategic measurement tool. Many companies have applied it to measure four key aspects of their organisations' performance: financial, customer, internal business process and learning and growth. Although it is widely used in the business arena, this original BSC was not developed to assess the impact of collaborative research projects under an open innovation strategy, where the outputs of research and development developed by collaborative projects undertaken by industry and universities should be measured in a different way. Therefore, this article will propose a scorecard to measure the outcomes of collaborative research and present two case studies of how companies are using this tool to measure the outcomes. It is important to recall that this scorecard has been developed during a collaborative research project by CEMEX Research Group AG (Switzerland) and Cranfield University (UK). During such project, a survey was developed to carry out interviews in a sample of 10 companies in UK, where it was confirmed that a collaborative BSC is a very useful tool to measure, track and improve the impact of conducting collaborative projects with universities. This article is an extended version of the one presented at the PRO-VE'09 conference (Flores et al. 2009. A balanced scorecard for measuring the impact of industry-university collaboration.
In recent years, the way corporates innovate has changed significantly. Going from 'behind closed doors' innovation to open innovation where collaboration with outsiders is encouraged, companies are in the pursuit of more effective ways to accelerate their innovation outcomes. As a result, many companies are investing to create more entrepreneurial environments, which not only empower employees to proactively propose and test new ideas, but also reach beyond company walls to involve many others in the co-creation of new solutions. In this paper, we outline the most notable benefits of hackathons from the perspective of large organizations, and present the benefits and a methodology for organizing hackathons, ie. competition-based events where participants work in small teams over a short period of time to ideate, design, rapidly prototype and test their ideas with a user-centric approach to solve a determined challenge. This paper also provides a brief insight into the CEMEX Hackathon, which was organized following the aforementioned methodology.
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