Ruben Robert Nieuwenhuis

This is a crucial question for a growing number of organizations worldwide. Rapidly, a new trend is emerging: ‘Open Innovation’. This trend embraces a variety of concepts and terminology, including: Wikinomics, user innovation, Citizen Participation, Innovation 2.0, and Consumer co-creation. Organizations are turning to consumers, experts, enthusiasts, and suppliers to assist them in improving and speeding up their innovation processes.  

Ruben Robert Nieuwenhuis is an expert in this domain. He knows the global best practices, and understands how organizations can make open innovation work for them.  As Innovation Manager at PartnersinPerspective and founder of Open Innovation Platform, Fellowforce.com, he is involved daily in many open innovation projects. His keynote speech: ‘The Business Smarts of Strangers: great concept but what about the practice’, has been a driver for management teams worldwide to speed up the external involvement of customers and experts.

Nieuwenhuis has lived and worked in , Kazakstan and The Netherlands. In his management book, ‘Weak Tea Will Bring you Nowhere’, he provides concise, confrontational and challenging advice on the topics of Open Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He claims that the ‘knowledge economy’ has been overtaken by the need for a new economy, which he defines as the ‘chance economy’. In the Chance Economy companies will only succeed if they make a firm choice for open innovation & ‘intrapreneurship’ and integrate these into their business model.  

The keynote speeches from Nieuwenhuis are characterized by his findings & unique examples, from a global perspective. Through his membership of the think-tank, FutureWorkForum.com, he is involved in researching upcoming trends and developments. He is a frequent presenter and has presented in many countries, most recently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, ; at the MindTrek Conference.

“We are shifting from a manufacturing driven economy to a user driven economy”, is the first sentence in a keynote speech from Ruben Robert Nieuwenhuis.