Open Innovation 2.0 Yearbook 2013 - European Commission - Europa

3.6. Horizon 2020: Regional Innovation Ecosystems — from theory to
practice
Three challenges to put
theory into practice
The name of the EU’s new funding programme
for research and innovation — Horizon 2020 —
reflects its ambition to deliver ideas, growth and
jobs for the future. The EU Committee of the
Regions (CoR) has stressed that the key issues
throughout Europe address ways of speeding up
the implementation of the most relevant flagship
activities, and ways of learning to exploit existing
research knowledge by sharing best practices and
other relevant knowledge. The CoR is challenging
both the European Commission and the regions
themselves to get the most out of Horizon 2020.
Local and regional authorities face the challenge
of developing cross-territorial and pan-European
cooperation. In particular, they need to be able to
develop joint platforms, such as innovation forums
and test beds for cooperation, by integrating real
and virtual worlds, in order to foster open innovation
and regional innovation ecosystems. Active
European cooperation would result in economies of
scale and the creation of wider markets for local
businesses and other local developments. Smart
specialisation — as the key guiding principle both
of Horizon 2020 and of cohesion policy — is opening
up new avenues to all this [1].
Professor Martin Curley, Director of Intel Labs
Europe, challenged the readers of the EU Open
Innovation 2012 yearbook with his message: ‘Open
Innovation 2.0 could be defined as the fusion of
Henry Chesbrough’s open innovation concept and
Henry Etzkowitz’s triple helix innovation concept.
Triple helix is about achieving structural innovation
improvements through proactive collaborations
between industry, academia, and government. The
impact of this collaborative innovation goes well
beyond the scope of what any organisation could
achieve on their own’ [2].
Effective regional innovation ecosystems (RIEs)
work through the three Horizon 2020 pillars —
Excellent Science, Industrial Leadership, and Societal
Challenges — to address local problems,
regional issues, and grand societal challenges.
Innovative practice is important here. Looking at
RIEs and their role as Europe’s pioneering innovation
hubs, we see unique possibilities to lift strategic
planning above the level of policies and papers
in order to achieve innovation outcomes that can
be experienced on the street. Increasingly, innovation
ecosystem thinking is being described — and
prescribed — for RDI organisations, business clusters,
and regions. Now that the concept appears in
policy and strategy papers, it is time to address the
practice beyond the theory.
Back in 2008, Professor C. K. Prahalad challenged
universities to create a new role for themselves
by defining three critical aspects of innovation
and value creation: (i) value will increasingly be
co-created with customers; (ii) no single firm has
the knowledge, skills, and resources it needs to cocreate
value with customers; (iii) the emerging markets
can be a source of innovation. And one of his
main conclusions should be considered especially
thoroughly when creating the new role for universities:
the competitive arena is shifting from a product-centric
paradigm of value creation to a personalised
experience-centric view of value creation [3].
In this article, we want to deepen this approach
to open and societal innovation by referring to
the results of CoR European workshops and using
examples of work at Finland’s Energising Urban
Ecosystems programme (EUE), the Aalto Camp for
Societal Innovation, and the New Club of Paris. In
this way, we hope to sketch a practical framework
for meeting the challenges of the CoR, Curley and
Prahalad.
The world is moving towards an era of true value
network competition and advantage, where innovation
and knowledge brokering will take place in
increasingly open, shared settings. Digitalisation
and globalisation have changed the business world
in a few years. Companies and other organisations
create value through networks in which they
cooperate and compete simultaneously. The future
success of innovation ecosystems is measured
increasingly in innovation actors’ abilities to connect
and manage their talent, partnerships, clusters
and practical innovation processes — in integrating
the local knowledge base into the global innovation
power grid. Active networking relationships with
global top-runner environments boost local abilities
to attract a continuous flow of global players [4].
Modernising the triple helix concept will not take
place on its own. Strong commitment to collaborative
change, together with the prioritisation of
appropriate measures, is needed. Good methods
needed for implementation will be developed and
the use of any necessary instruments will be partly
financed through the EU cohesion policy funds.
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