Open Innovation 2.0 Yearbook 2013 - European Commission - Europa

even learn to pilot, experiment and scale up for new
types of firms and economic activities, including
non-profit activities and social enterprising.
Having the public engaged in solving the societal
challenges offers an opportunity to strengthen
participative democracy and open society development
in Europe. Europe has the potential to become
a people-driven dynamic open society that does
not shy away from the major problems of our time
but rather organises itself around them. However,
this calls for strategic action: we should learn to
mobilise the dialogue and resources for creative
and innovative RDI in a way that respects human
beings, nature and quality of life.
This is how Finland views itself as a society. Finland
has created a bottom-up, dialogical, collaborative
and human-centric strategy that is central to its
development as a nation [7]. This fresh picture of
a people-driven society is based on the idea that
the society best develops based on its dynamic
individuals and their networks. Finland’s vision of
a society is very pragmatic but value and future
driven. Finland aims at being a Silicon Valley for
social innovation by 2030.
This article discusses that Europe, as an Innovation
Union, calls for new forms of strategic collaborative
action that implies the integration of research
and innovation instruments and public and private
actors for collaborative RDI and entrepreneurship.
We argue that this is best done in open and collaborative
ecosystems for RDI: this also helps in engaging
the people. We further argue that this can be
done based on high levels of education of the people
of Europe, increased consciousness about the
problems at hand and the facilitation of ICT. People
are willing to be of service and contribute: the issue
is how to make this happen.
Collaborative innovation
ecosystems challenge firms
What about the role of firms in solving societal
challenges of our time?
Porter and Kramer [8] argue that the capitalist
system is under siege; in recent years business
has increasingly been viewed as a major cause
of social, environmental, and economic problems.
Companies are widely perceived to be prospering
at the expense of the broader community. They
are blamed for society’s failures. The legitimacy
of business has fallen to levels not seen in recent
history. Porter and Kramer further argue that
the problem is the outdated approach of firms to
value creation; it is viewed narrowly, optimising
short-term financial performance in a bubble while
missing the most important customer needs and
ignoring the broader influences that determine
longer-term success.
Scott and Davis [9] argue that, by definition, firms
are the best positioned for efficient problem-solving
and innovation. That is why mankind has developed
this organisational ‘format’ in the first place: firms
are supposed to have capabilities to mobilise people
and other resources in efficient ways around
problem-solving, innovation and effective implementation
[10]. Firms operate as long-lasting missions
or ‘projects’ deploying strategies, structures,
processes and practices that are most purposeful
and efficient to the task at hand. However, we
may argue that, over time, there may have been
too much emphasis on the internal efficiency of
the firm at the expense of the ‘external efficiency’;
customers and society may have suffered from
this ‘biased’ approach. Porter and Kramer [8] want
to balance this tendency; firms should enter into
shared value creation that involves creating economic
value in a way that also creates value for
society by addressing its needs and challenges.
They see that, today, there is a cliff between economic
and social development due to presumed
trade-offs between economic efficiency and social
progress.
Horizon 2020’s third pillar offers a good opportunity
to look at how we Europeans may balance economic
and social development. We have the opportunity
now to experiment with new firm–society collaboration
in shared value creation when solving the
major societal challenges of energy efficiency, wellbeing
and welfare services, intelligent and integrated
traffic and transportation, green, digitalised
and smart cities, resource efficiency and poverty,
among others. While US RDI policy has the emphasis
on corporate-driven RDI, Porter and Kramer [8]
propose that corporate sector should take the lead
in this balancing act!
The European Innovation Union and Innovation
Partnership can be seen as frameworks and transformation
mechanisms for solving societal challenges
toward shared value creation. That may
even bring about the foundations for a European
sustainable socioeconomic model [11].
We argue that firms benefit from firm–society collaboration
in RDI ecosystems when rethinking their
strategic positioning in terms of technologies and
markets, when experimenting and piloting for new
open service and technology architectures, and
when reforming a business model or even the whole
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