Open Innovation experts gathered in Silicon Valley for the second Annual World Open Innovation Conference on November 18-20, 2015. The conference was a great opportunity for industry leaders and academic scholars to get together and talk about open innovation issues. Conference attendees actively tweeted during the conference, as well as in the days leading up to and after the event, using the hashtag #WOIC2015.

To get an understanding of how attendees were interacting with each other online during the conference, I scraped Twitter for the tweets that contained that hashtag and then used R for data and social network analysis. In total there were 554 English language tweets, tweeted by 93 unique users for that time period. Visualizing the network of attendees active on Twitter, using retweeting activity as the link between users, shows a tight-knit community with several influencers. Further analysis of the hashtags they used alongside of #WOIC2015 uncovered interesting subjects that were discussed during the conference sessions. For example, ecosystems, family firms, and the internet of things (IoT) were among the topics on the agenda.

Interested in attending the next WOIC? More details about the conference here.