Create

6
A Summary of the Project
This is the final report on the CREATE project
(Grant Agreement 211512) of FP7 under
designation “AAT-2007-7-4: Stimulating radical
technological changes”. This was initiated
following an earlier path-finding, but limited,
project called “Out of the Box”.
The CREATE project studied and tested all
the steps necessary to take ideas for radical
changes in air transport to actual research.
This is called the CREATE process.
It includes the mechanisms to encourage
concepts and ideas to be put forward,
providing assistance for their development
and extension, allowing additional data and
constructive views to be brought to their
support and for the idea to be set out in a
developed proposal for assessment for its
suitability for research. The initial stage of
research is called incubation.
Five mechanisms were addressed: Creative
Workshops, an Innopedia web-based
discussion process, Technology Watch to
introduce new technological opportunities,
the IDEA Portal to assist originators to use
these facilities and to develop their ideas
and the Assessment process for impartial
review. Each of these is described in detail in
the report.
The CREATE project set out to define, test
by demonstration and refine each of the
CREATE process components except that it
was never the intention to carry out a trial
of the incubation process given the cost and
length of time that this would take. However,
this apart, all the processes have been tested
for their suitability for implementation
and, where appropriate, the work needed
to implement them has been defined. In
two areas it is concluded that the processes
examined should not be implemented with
public funds, the establishment of the wikibased
Innopedia and that of Technology
Watch. In the area of incubation contracts
no test has been carried out, nor was one
intended in the project description. However,
the preliminaries to such a contract and the
management of it have been studied and are
reported.
The CREATE process is concerned with
innovation in aviation. It does not seek to
address all kinds of innovation but a relatively
narrow, important part of the whole. It does
not displace any other routes to innovation but
augments them.
It aims to stimulate novel changes to the
aviation system with particular attention to
those that are cross-sector, transformational
in their implications, and concerned with the
long-term future aviation system. ‘Innovation’
is a very broad topic and covers every kind of
novel change from the smallest amendment
to a business process up to the most radical,
far-reaching, often technologically based
application of a new idea. It is important,
therefore that the boundaries of the CREATE
process are understood.
The background to innovation in this Report
briefly covers the historical pressures for
change in aviation and explains how these
pressures have changed and become more
integrated in their application to the air
transport system. The Report shows that the
high benefit, high risk class of innovations
described above as the focus for the CREATE
process effectively has no mechanism by
which they can be studied for potential use
in the long term future. The reasons for this
are explored and related to the current and
future challenges that the air transport system
will face. The need for a new mechanism
is explained - one which will address this
particular set of innovations and allow them to
be studied and tested for validity as potential
elements in a future air transport system.
Most novel ideas face hostility and it is no
different, is perhaps even more accentuated,
in this particular sub-set. Given the radical
nature of some of the ideas it is likely that they
would face premature and negative decisions.
To overcome this the key process element
is seen to be an “incubation” stage. This is
comparable to a nursery for children; the child
is allowed to grow in a protected environment,
to acquire greater knowledge free of demands
for performance. Eventually, of course, the
child must meet the demands for performance,
competition and choice but the period in the
nursery equips them to meet these forces.
Incubation as a concept is a parallel to this. It
will provide a protected environment where the
viability of an idea can be studied, expanded
and developed to the stage where it can
provide comparable credibility to established
evolutionary ideas. In one respect, however, the
incubation stage is unlike a nursery. If the work
to develop the idea shows that it cannot work
then the incubation should be stopped.