Open Innovation 2.0 Yearbook 2013 - European Commission - Europa

44 O P E N I N N O V A T I O N 2 0 1 3
industry. The RDI in collaborative ecosystems may
be used when changing the centralised production
and delivery patterns towards a more distributed
situation, when moving towards more customerdriven
structures in industry, and when moving
towards more partnering, networking and collaboration-based
business ecosystems.
Process of collaborative RDI
for shared value creation
At the beginning of the 21st century, the global
company AGC Glass [12] wanted to rethink its
technology base and consequent role in the global
marketplace. It invited a wide and strategic group
of customers, firms and experts, and its own people
to rethink: what else could glass do for us besides
what it already does? The process ended up changing
the role, technological properties and use of
glass, even to the point where it became a protective
and breathing ‘skin for us’ in houses, cars
and other applications. This process included wide
idea collection and piloting and experimentation
with new technologies, business models for social
and economic validation, and the means of implementing
a new strategy. The experimentation also
involved issues such as: do we need new service
logic as well as industrial logic? What are the new
sources of scalability, productivity, and efficiency?
How can we contribute to sustainable development?
The collaborative RDI process may have steps such
as the following.
(i) Mission, vision and strategy creation with a wide
collection of ideas about future issues and scenarios,
including experimentation and piloting
around a set of potential hypotheses and preconcepts
for solution.
(ii) Focused experimentation around selected sets
of hypotheses and properties of pre-concepts
as service or business models, or specifications
for architectural or ecosystem designs.
This includes economic and social validation of
new concepts with firms, public agencies, and
people: this is a wide, interactive dialogue with
future ‘markets’ of emerging innovations. This
broadens the understanding about the sources
of the economic, social and environmental sustainability
of value propositions.
(iii) Furthermore, we may commit partners, developer
communities and people to the co-creation
of features of usage and sources of economic
and social scalability. This pre-market prototyping,
experimentation and piloting is designed to
capture the new market dynamism and customer
behaviour and the personalised and generic functionalities
of future usages, among other things.
(iv) We may even enter into wide-scale experimentation
and piloting that brings about understanding
of how to implement new solutions:
how to produce and to deliver. All of these
steps involve — in different ways and combinations
— own people, customers, collaborative
firms, experts and others.
(v) And, we may even experiment with new forms of
entrepreneurial activities — and firms! We argue
that there is an opportunity to create foundational
elements of a new value creation ‘formula’
for firms — non-profit or profit based — to
emerge.
Like AGC Glass, IBM, Nokia and many other corporations
have used ICT, social media, social webs,
crowdsourcing and other means of dialogue for
identifying — even with millions of customers and
experts — strategic challenges and their solutions
for future development. Nokia [13] has developed
a crowdsourcing-based dialogical strategy and practice
for listening to consumers and developers in the
RDI of mobility. IBM has come up with service offerings
and concepts towards the Smart Planet and
Smart City [14].
It is evident that the integration and engagement
approaches have an impact on the whole process of
collaborative RDI: from strategy to implementation.
This is imperative while the shared inquiry aims at
developing answers to complex, all-inclusive questions
such as: what are the new consumption and
production patterns for sustainable development?
How do we design cities for green growth? How do
we design welfare systems that are efficient not only
as a service or production system, but also from the
viewpoint of ‘customers’ or, rather, human beings?
How do we improve traffic and transportation systems
to become environmentally sustainable, intelligent
and ‘user-friendly’? Do we need to develop new distributed
co-production systems of energy? How do we
change the energy consumption behaviour of people?
However, the challenge is to integrate the bottomup
and top-down approach and means of ‘control
and setting free’. It is also demanding to transcend
beyond one’s own strategies, agendas, competences
and resources. Furthermore, open ecosystems
challenge the underlying principles and practices
of IPR (intellectual property rights). IPR may
reflect, in a righteous way, the role of partners and
the process and context of the creation and usage
of IPR. The Netherlands has even created instruments
for citizen rewards (vouchers) in RDI!
This is what is going on in the EU-funded PPP project
on the Future Internet (FI PPP). In this project,