December 6, 2014The Final Day of WOIC 2014Friday brought the second and final day of the World Open Innovation Conference in Napa. To me, the day seemed every bit as successful as the first — but perhaps that was just being able (as were other organizers) to unwind at the end of the day. By the end of the day, I was slightly dazed and confused, trying to juggle various hats: organizer, plenary presenter, tweeter (in a futile attempt to out-do Piller and Bogers), blogger and photographer.To the latter point, my conference pictures are finally posted to Google’s Picasa. I wasted nearly an hour trying to get the (original and latest) client app to work — it’s not clear if it failed due to bugs in the software or in the user design. I finally gave up and created an album of some 90 photos using the web client.Nonaka’s Rare AppearanceWe were thrilled to be joined by Ikujiro Nonaka (author of the seminal knowledge creation research), and his willingness to attend both days of the conference. Given his age (79) and health, we were uncertain to the last minute whether or not he could make it.Not surprisingly, he quoted Drucker and other work  — in addition to his own 2011 HBR article — on the importance of knowledge for the success of modern firms. He also provided numerous examples of Japanese (and one Chinese) companies that empowered workers to enable their creativity and knowledge creation abilities.Perhaps his most quoted example (at least on Friday) was the waigaya (open dialog) offsite process used by Honda. It required a “good location, good hotel, good food and good spa.” It seems to be a common team-building formula — except that (beyond Finland) the spa/sauna element is rarely used.Showcase PresentersThree papers were singled out by the program committee for special visibility due to the quality of their initial submission. (Some papers got much better when the final paper was submitted, but these papers had the most polished abstracts at the original deadline).WIth “The Architecture of Evaluation Processes in Open Innovation Settings,” Christoph Hienerth discussed the difficulty of firms using crowds to evaluate the quality of inbound innovations. In particular, he outlined the tradeoffs between two forms of evaluation:Validity by expertise: the feedback must come from those with specific skillsValidity by numbers: no skill is required, so the more feedback the betterNicolette Lakemond presented “The Role of Knowledge Governance in Open Innovation,” by which firms must set different approaches to govern knowledge flows in support of their OI strategies. They identify two forms of governance — authority and consensus — and measure the impact of such efforts on innovation by manufacturing firms in Sweden, Finland and Italy.The final showcase paper was presented by Jonathan Sims. Entitled “Inbound, Outbound and Coupled Open Innovation Practices