Open Innovation 2.0 Yearbook 2013 - European Commission - Europa

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infrastructure between participating partners can
create synergies in using knowledge, skills, and
resources to co-create value with customers, and
how experience-centric models value creation can
be applied.
Collaborative innovation goes beyond the scope of
what organisations can achieve on their own, and
Martin Curley challenged researchers and practitioners
to actively integrate open innovation concepts
with triple helix thinking in order to strive for
structural innovation improvements through the
proactive collaboration of industry, academia and
government. This integration is embedded in EUE
practice, where large and small firms, Aalto University,
and the City of Espoo work closely together.
Proactive collaboration is the promise of practice
within EUE activities.
The CoR sees the challenge for local and regional
authorities to develop cross-territorial and pan-
European cooperation and, in particular, joint platforms,
innovation forums and test beds for cooperation
to foster open innovation and regional
innovation ecosystems. Espoo’s T3, with its integration
of virtual and physical worlds in a street-side
test bed, is an example of how this can be an effective
tool for enhancing innovative capacity.
Looking at the relevance of the EUE programme
to Horizon 2020, we see a number of important
aspects, including:
1. the example of a pioneering innovation region:
how to create and maintain an effective
regional innovation ecosystem;
2. Espoo T3 as a test bed for specific innovative
practices: developing realistic, close-to-thestreet
innovations in practice, with measurable
effect on the lives of citizens and stakeholders;
3. many of the technologies, methodologies, working
processes and collaboration models developed
here can be applied in other European
regions;
4. the scaling of relevant concepts, working processes,
results, and research questions is possible:
lessons learned here could become lessons
to be learned elsewhere.
A unifying theme of the three challenges is collaborative
cross-border innovation practice. Activities
for crossing borders within the EUE ecosystem
are essential ingredients of the RIE orchestration
model, while pan-European cooperation and
test beds can be addressed by the kind of scaling
described below.
The potential for scaling
Scaling to other regions in Europe means cocreating
opportunities for entrepreneurial learning
among different regions. Three workbenches are
relevant here: benchmarking effectiveness, benchlearning
— which refers to learning together from
work in progress — and bench-doing, which means
addressing open questions proactively in jointly initiated
projects carried out together.
Sharing work-in-progress with the aim of continuously
improving work processes is a cornerstone
of open innovation practice. Scaling of this kind
requires partners in different parts of Europe with
comparable ambitions around creating and maintaining
regional innovation ecosystems. These
would not be programme or project partners in the
traditional sense, but rather partners in an international
learning community focused on improving
their own innovation ecosystems through collaboration
learning. The EUE programme sees opportunities
for its own programme for sharing knowledge
about its processes with other partners in entrepreneurial
learning relationships. These opportunities
are also relevant throughout the diverse realms of
Horizon 2020 and Cohesion Policy funding.
In considering scaling of this kind, there are two
relevant aspects.
• What to scale: processes.
• What to learn: patterns.
In the EUE programme context, insights gained
from the development and use of many work processes,
methodologies and tools for creating and
maintaining innovation ecosystems, for orchestrating
support infrastructure, and for facilitating
partners and internal processes, would be relevant
for this kind of scaling and co-creative learning. In
addition, specific technologies developed by various
researchers and companies — even in beta versions
— may be appropriate for scaling as well.
One of the potential benefits of this kind of scaling
is the insight gained about the patterns of working
with innovation processes. Once we understand and
document the patterns emerging within the Espoo
T3 innovation ecosystem, scaling to other regions
would allow researchers to discover if the similar
patterns apply, for example, in other regions of Nordic
countries, or other European regions, or Europe
as a whole. Are there typical Finnish, or Nordic, or
perhaps European-wide patterns of innovation ecosystems,
and what consequences do these have for
our work?