This year, the conference took place virtually, organized by RWTH Aachen. The E&I Institute, one of the leading institutions in this field of research, attended the OUI 2021 with a large team of 10 presenting researchers. In a number of well-received academic presentations, the E&I team members presented their research on topics such as crowdsourcing, lead users, toolkits and user generated innovation in front of prominent researchers such as MIT Professor Eric von Hippel, whose works laid the foundation for user innovation research. In addition, Prof. Franke gave a speech on the future of OUI.

The picture was taken in 2019, when the conference still took place offline.