ME Professor Alice Agogino, along with Dr. Sohyeong Kim from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, recently won a grant from the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study.

Working with Prof. Martin Steinert at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), this award will seed research on “Open Innovation in Food Innovation and Design: Comparative Case Study of California Cuisine and New Nordic Cuisine”. This is an extension of Dr. Sohyeong Kim’s dissertation research on open innovation and the northen california cuisine movement started by Alice Waters (Alice wrote us a letter of support for the proposal). The Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study is named after Norwegian-born Peder Sather, a former trustee of the College of California (which later became the University of California) and is the name on Sather Gate, which separates Sproul Plaza from a bridge over Strawberry Creek, as well as on Sather Tower, often known as the Campanile.

The Chez Panisse research was recently written up as a Berkeley-Haas case study: Chez Panisse: Building an Open Innovation Ecosystem and also in the Harvard Business Review , 2014. Also in the California Management Review, Vol. 56, No. 4, Summer 2014. News article in the UC Berkeley Newswire: Open Innovation Found to Be Basic Ingredient of Chez Panisse’s Success: Case study by Dr. Sohyeong Kim, Alice Agogino and Prof. Henry Chesbrough, UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Photo Caption: Arianne Agogino Gieringer, Alice M. Agogino, Sohyeong Kim, Alice Waters and Edible School Yard team behind Chez Panisse showing Alice Waters data used in Sohyeong’s dissertation (left). Alice Agogino and Sohyeong Kim honoring Peder Sather at Sather Gate (center and right; photo credit: Lee-Huang Chen).

Also check out recent news on our research framing Alice Waters’s work as an example of Open Innovation: Alice Waters and the culture of open innovation: food for digital marketers’ thought. Sohyeong gave a talk at Food Innovation in Milan and will be running a workshop there. They have created the first food design master program in the world, with funding by Google Kitchen to start the food maker space.

Featured Image Caption: Arianne Agogino Gieringer, me, doctoral student Sohyeong Kim, Alice Waters and Edible School Yard team behind Chez Panisse. Showing Alice Waters data used in Sohyeong’s dissertation. Written up as a Berkeley-Haas case study: Chez Panisse: Building an Open Innovation Ecosystem, and also as a Harvard Business Review case, 2014. Parts of the case will appear in the California Management Review, Vol. 56, No. 4, Summer 2014.