Open Innovation 2.0 Yearbook 2013 - European Commission - Europa

90 O P E N I N N O V A T I O N 2 0 1 3
Ramps to escape the resistance to change
How does a pioneering innovation region develop
the momentum to accelerate innovation and
escape the gravity of resistance to change and
reluctance to act? The simple answer is that
regions can do this in the same way pioneers do:
by hard work, using relevant resources, appropriate
skills, and proven practice, and engaging broad
segments of the population to make the journey
together. This means investing in practice. Pioneering
regions work with methodologies of change
to engage people, define shared purpose, create
conditions for good collaboration, build capacity,
showcase examples, and show the way forward.
This section of our paper indicates how some of
this proven practice can be directly applied to help
pioneering innovation regions ramp up to leverage
research excellence, industrial leadership and
the power of people to create social and societal
innovations.
Launching new initiatives is a necessary part of
societal innovation and, in many cases, acceleration
is needed to escape the gravity of forces holding
innovation back — the resistance to change,
the reluctance to act, the fear of failure, the uncertainty
of risks. Ramps are one of our oldest ‘technologies’
for reducing friction, and they can be useful
tools to overcome the resistance of gravity. The
New Club of Paris encourages creating ‘ramps’ for
societal innovation.
The New Club of Paris (NCP) is a global network
organisation working as an agenda developer for
knowledge societies. Established in 2006, its goal
is to help countries, regions and organisations make
the transition to a knowledge society. The NCP does
not provide answers, but develops frameworks
for asking powerful questions. Clear metrics and
cutting-edge research are part of their arsenal of
instruments, and its members have extensive experience
with using intellectual capital instruments.
Building on this experience, and based on lessons
garnered from many decades of members’ practice,
the NCP has been successful in developing effective
instruments for innovation in knowledge societies,
using research and metrics to support processes
of engagement, participation and change. To
address the challenges of accelerating innovation
in pioneering regions, the NCP proposes a focus on
practical actions, applying existing knowledge and
change methodologies in supporting regions to
address actual and pressing issues. They suggest
that regions can create ramps for societal innovation,
using co-creation principles to prototype processes
that can already provide societal outcomes
even as they develop. Diverse change technologies
are available for the ramp, focusing on practical
actions such as:
• engaging key players in the ecosystem;
• creating awareness, interest and conditions to
‘go beyond’;
• enabling deeper understanding of issues,
broader societal contexts, opportunities and
possible consequence of choices;
• closing the gap between talking, thinking and
theory by probing, prototyping and practice;
• creating fast cycles of prototypes for rapid
realisation.
Specifically, a region would be able to work towards
developing a culture of innovativeness driven by
entrepreneurial spirit, thus creating conditions for
key entrepreneurial processes such as exploring,
discovering, and pioneering to succeed. Within this
culture, the engagement of stakeholders in participatory
processes is central. This could be accomplished
in a prototyping context, accelerating the
process of engaging stakeholders and citizens,
taking advantage of existing investment choices,
reducing political risk and industrial lock-in, and
speeding up the learning process. The movement
from intent to implementation can be conceptualised
as a possible 1-year work process to take
intent to implementation (Table 2). In this process,
the ramp is both a conceptual — but also a physical
and virtual — location where both work place and
work process facilitate people to focus on the nuts
and bolts of concrete experimenting [8].