Open Innovation 2.0 Yearbook 2013 - European Commission - Europa

100 O P E N I N N O V A T I O N 2 0 1 3
was used to design the original ACSI concept, and
has been adopted in developing ACSI-style interventions
for the EUE programme. Two additional
aspects were added to the original five, creating the
concept of an innovation dynamo to challenge the
thinking of T3 ecosystem participants.
The Innovation Dynamo (Figure 2) harnesses the
five discovery skills to two aspects of the innovation
process essential to realising innovation in practice:
implementing and creating impact.
• Associating is the ability to make connections,
linking seemingly unrelated issues and ideas in
new fruitful combinations.
• Questioning leverages the power of provocative
questions to create new perspectives and
modes of thinking.
• Observing is the key to understanding how
things in the world work, and why people
behave as they do.
Figure 2: The Innovation Dynamo
• Experimenting means going with best guesses
and not being afraid of failing your way forward.
It is an essential skill of innovators.
• Networking allows us to tap into collective and distributed
intelligence for insight, explanation, expertise,
and inspiration, as well as critical thinking.
• Implementing is the litmus test for innovators
— realising a good idea in practice.
• Creating impact — and celebrating it. This is the
proof of the pudding: does a new product, service
or realised idea actually create value for
its users — and for the ecosystem? If it does,
then we should celebrate it, making it clear to
all those involved that this innovation works.
This is how the Innovation Dynamo generates innovation
power and the energy required to maintain
the ecosystem. Working with these skills, pioneering
innovation regions are able to leverage their potential
to create societal impact.
Changing mindsets is an important and often difficult
aspect of the innovation process, but it is essential
both on an individual and a collective level. Thinking
in outcomes instead of outputs, and thinking in
ecosystems instead of areas, is required for progress
to be made and pioneering regions to prosper. Mov-
ing from proprietary ownership to open innovation,
from personal interest to partnership, from following
to initiating, from risk-aversion to experimentation
— these are building blocks that the culture of
innovation Europe is looking for, and which the Horizon
2020 programme hopes to achieve. They mark