Open Innovation 2.0 Yearbook 2013 - European Commission - Europa

The thrust of the recommendations for regional
actors is that they need to make use of diverse
European instruments such as Local Digital Agendas
(LDAs), Regional Innovation Strategies based
on smart specialisation (RIS3) and Territorial Pacts,
in order to accelerate smart growth by fostering
a new innovation mindset, strengthening entrepreneurial
discovery, building on dialogue, enhancing
collaboration and co-creativity, learning from best
practice, and taking new actor groups on board in
striving for societal innovation. For their part, EU
and regional/local policymakers should actively
create conditions in order to put a stronger focus
on bottom-up policies and regional innovation
ecosystem development, increase assistance for
regions to run pilots and demonstration projects,
and advance innovation cultures at the regional
level through increasing entrepreneurial education
at secondary school, vocational school and university
levels.
This resonates clearly with insights coming from
the work of the New Club of Paris, with early results
from Finland’s EUE (Energising Urban Ecosystems)
programme, and the ideas actualised through ACSI
(the Aalto Camp for Societal Innovation). Examples
are described at greater length in the following
sections.
The practice of realising
regional policy renewal
Europe needs pioneering innovation regions
Regional innovation ecosystems support larger
national and pan-national innovation systems, and
they can pioneer innovations of many kinds. They
are essential learning arenas for building the future
of Europe.
Europe needs pioneering innovation regions.
The CoR has called for pioneering regions to
form European consortiums integrating different
capabilities to create groundbreaking societal
innovations for Europe-wide use. It also calls for
increased performance capabilities of regions
and cities to use the Horizon 2020 programme
and other similar initiatives. The focus should be,
in particular, on making full use of digitalisation
and new key enabling technologies to modernise
regional innovation policy. Furthermore, the CoR
encourages the regions to move towards open
innovation, within a human-centred vision of partnerships
between public and private sector actors,
with universities and other knowledge institutions
playing a crucial role [7].
A Europe built on innovative regions is a Europe
of many possibilities, resilient in the face of societal
challenges, global competition and financial
uncertainty. A Europe of diverse regions can leverage
diversity, moving at different speeds along
diverse paths in the future. This is the reality that
an Innovation Union faces. Within this diversity, different
regions will play different roles on the road
ahead. One role of crucial importance is that of
the pioneer, the region that explores new ground,
sets examples, shows the way, and prepares the
ground for others. Pioneering innovative regions
can take advantage of their capacity to experiment
and their drive to excel, to become forward camps
on the journey that other regions will eventually
make from local improvements to regional welfare,
a journey that builds European prosperity through
balanced contributions.
Pioneers establish themselves in previously
unknown environments — be they physical, cognitive
or conceptual territories — and discover how to
engage the actors in experiments aimed at making
the territory fertile ground for further development.
They are innovators, restless by nature: ‘boldly going
where none have gone before’ is characteristic of
the pioneer temperament. But moving ahead of
events into the future is not the only thing pioneers
do: they also know they must first learn how the
worlds they explore could actually work. New knowledge
is turned into daily practice. Their experiments
may not always succeed but when they do, they
result in a better quality of life, concrete examples
and scalable processes, preparing the way for others
to follow. So they stay to reap the early rewards
before moving on. In this sense, ‘boldly going’ goes
hand in hand with ‘boldly staying’. And others do follow,
translating lessons learned into daily practice.
In this way, impossible dreams become possible.
Translating these metaphors to actual regional ecosystems
requires courage, curiosity and creativity
skill sets. Resistance to change can be widespread,
even where major business and government stakeholders
acknowledge the importance of innovation.
Pioneering is a challenge, and following after is easier
than the initial pathfinding. The knowing–doing gap
must be bridged: producing policy papers and wellwrought
strategic planning reports is not the same as
realising them in practice. Collaboration provides its
own obstacles: the need for trust, respect and mutual
understanding among partners; speeding up is easier
alone than in tandem. The gravity that keeps our feet
on solid ground can often translate into reluctance
to experiment or boldly act, and must, at times, be
overcome. None of this is ever easy.
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