Open Innovation 2.0 Yearbook 2013 - European Commission - Europa

European ICT companies are collaborating with cities
and public services in order to meet people’s
expectations of a more transparent and efficient
society with increasing digital social capital and
participation. The FI PPP is tapping into this unprecedented
window of opportunity for new types of
openness and co-creation. By joining forces, European
stakeholders can develop not only novel and
innovative Future Internet-enabled services, but
also innovative concepts through demand-driven
innovations and collaborative innovation networks
that can become a new European-led market concept
in global competition.
Need for new funding instruments?
Europe may need to also consider funding arrangements
that integrate individual, local or regional
and national efforts across borders for RDI that
solve societal challenges of our time. We may
even need to pilot a cross-border funding agency,
a ‘European innovation’ or ‘venture fund’ that combines
European interests with national, local and
regional interests and provides not only RDI funding
for experimentation with new innovations but
also pre-market and ‘early-market’ ‘venture’ funding
for validation and scalability of new service and
business models towards new market and industry
creation — even with global reach. Along with
new funding instruments for entrepreneurship, we
may also need cross-border entrepreneurship programmes
and activities for bridging the ‘death
valley’ from RDI to international market place.
This may mean improving regional, national and
European-wide networks, frameworks, instruments
and RDI infrastructures towards European strategic
RDI goals of jobs and growth for entrepreneurial
activities.
This may include competitive pre-market and
‘early-market’ venture funding of new businesses,
firms and other entrepreneurial activities. European-wide
cross-border collaboration in RDI should
be sustained through network efficiency that sustains
and scales up new findings towards the global
marketplace. This is what project-by-project-based
collaboration and funding do not offer.
However, the solving of the major societal challenges
of our time through collaborative RDI is
a costly and resource-intensive way to conduct RDI,
which means that this approach should be used
with strong strategic arguments, resource commitments
and long-lasting motivation.
Currently, in Finland, Tekes, the Finnish Funding
Agency for Technology and Innovation, explores new
roles for itself in Fuelling Finnish Innovation [15].
During the 2000s, there was a change in innovation
policy towards a more demand and customeroriented
standpoint, based on networks and open
innovation ecosystems that are embedded in the
global economy. Policies aiming to enhance and
promote innovation are no longer restricted to manufacturing
and R & D-intensive technologies but
have to take into account wider opportunities for
innovation such as the services sector. Tekes views
that, from the mid-2000s onwards, knowledge
bases and policymaking have expanded towards
a more general, socioeconomic context and way
of thinking. The new Finnish broad-based national
innovation strategy targets these challenges. This
is a major shift: even in the 1990s, the Finnish
innovation strategy emphasised technology-driven
integration, user-orientation and societal impacts
of technology related R & D. In the 1980s, there
was a move from science to technology policy when
promoting the techno-economic emphasis in the
development of the Finnish economy.
Based on the shift in innovation policy thinking in
Finland, Tekes considers new roles, among other
things, concerning RDI in societal challenges.
Besides funding roles, it may even facilitate the
whole process of innovation. Tekes also considers
what role it should take as a local, regional,
national and global actor in RDI, how it should
promote new RDI partnership constellations and
RDI networks, and how it could facilitate mission
and vision creation processes through its foresight
for vision creation activities. It also considers if it
should be involved in the RDI programme creation
in some complex cases such as those related to
societal challenges.
Academia needs to integrate not
only research and innovation
but also disciplines
From the viewpoint of academia, Nelson, in Scientific
American [16], discusses the challenge of solving
major societal problems of our time as an issue
of ‘a convergence revolution and a paradigm shift
which leads to rethinking of how scientific research
can be conducted’.
Convergence as a research design involves merging
distinct methodologies, technologies, tools, processing
principles, and other elements of research
designs into a unified whole. The Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) views this approach to
research as a blueprint for innovation. Convergence
is a paradigm shift, but not just, in Thomas Kuhn’s
terms, within a discipline [17]. Convergence means
a broad rethinking of how all scientific research can
be conducted, so that we capitalise on a range of
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