Alejandro Tosina, Chief Advisor
From 2019 onwards, he has held management positions in strategic consulting firms like SILO, DELOITTE and GRANT THORNTON, having supported multiple public and private entities in their growth and innovation strategies. From 2017 to 2018 he was appointed Director of Digital Economy at RED.ES, a national public agency, dependent on the Secretary of State for the Information Society and Digital Agenda, in charge of promoting the digital transformation of the Spanish economy.
Previously, he has worked for 12 years at the CDTI (Center for Industrial Technological Development), with responsibility for evaluation and monitoring of RDI business projects, financial support for recently created technology-based companies, design of RDI financing instruments, including Public Procurement of Innovation, quality and process management, and he was National Representative and Contact Point of the 7th EU R&D Framework Programme.
He is currently also an expert trainer in European Funds for CEOE Campus and the International School of Public Services (EISP).
IFI Report ES – Instrumentos Orientados a Misiones
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1/2021 IFI Report ES - Instrumentos Orientados a Misiones
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International analysis on mission-oriented instruments
At the Insight Foresight Institute, we have recently conducted a study for ENISA – Empresa Nacional de Innovacion, S.A. on this subject focusing on initiatives launched by public sector entities. Our mapping points to initiatives that explicitly address mission orientation and ecosystem-based approaches to a greater or lesser extent. Our work helps to understand how mission-oriented innovation initiatives operate and everything that actually happens, from the pre-planning stages to the moment they are launched, and we start to see short- and long-term results, going through all the necessary economic, political and social organization and management to make each initiative happen.
Today there is a growing global concern about economic, social and environmental issues, and therefore, different countries are trying to be actors of change and close the gap between just creating knowledge and actually taking action. Indeed, a series of decisive policy measures and efforts are needed to ensure that the innovation policies of the next generations are up to the challenges we are facing today. Focusing on mission orientation is a new challenge, but it is also a great opportunity. An opportunity motivated by the ambition to explore the ecosystem’s tools more broadly by leveraging the relationship with entrepreneurs and the notion of mission to move towards an optimal social position.
Beyond generating economic growth, entrepreneurial ecosystems and innovation policies are increasingly expected to contribute to solving social challenges and that is why many of the mission-oriented innovation initiatives have as one of their key objectives to foster the implementation of the SDGs.
Innovation policies, therefore, seek to generate transformational change in society. However, attention must be paid to the possible areas of failure that arise when implementing these policies for change, which are directionality, policy coordination, demand-articulation and reflexivity. To achieve the objective of these policies, it is necessary to implement measures that ensure coordination between these policies and the different sectors of society to stimulate new development paths and increase solutions that better respond to challenges at a local, national, European and global level.
Missions have a great power of change that can also contribute to the development of ecosystems. It is essential to support entrepreneurship and understand the complexity of its operating environment to be able to offer help and resources efficiently. In this sense, the concept of ecosystem has great value in the entrepreneurship environment and refers to the above. It can be said that ecosystems involve an interrelationship between companies and their social, political, academic and economic environment, and depending on the environment this relationship will be more or less fluid. It is very difficult to determine these relationships independently, so it is more appropriate to address them all together. All these factors are considered and put in value when proposing mission-oriented innovation initiatives, since they are initiatives with enormous transforming power and before launching a project of this size it is necessary to be very conscious of all that it implies and all the elements that compose it in order to achieve the objectives set in an effective way.
The rationale elaborated above directs our mapping towards initiatives that explicitly address mission orientation and ecosystem-based approaches to a greater or lesser extent. Therefore, in this study, we have chosen to analyze different mission-oriented innovation initiatives from three different approaches that in practice often overlap.
- On the one hand, we have research-driven, mission-oriented innovation initiatives with an emphasis on knowledge creation. These initiatives are mainly led by research organizations that address specific challenges with clear objectives, concrete deadlines and give enormous importance to the development of technology, as it produces a great social impact. In this section, we have included three initiatives that we have found very interesting, such as the Horizon Europe missions, the SFI challenges and the Vinnova challenge-driven innovation program.
- On the other hand, we have industry-driven innovation ecosystem initiatives with an emphasis on knowledge application. These initiatives are led by large corporations involving diverse stakeholders to jointly address innovation and market creation, often in relation to poorly defined challenges. What differentiates this category from the other two is the existence of a mature business model and an effective industry structure at the international level. In this section, the initiatives chosen were the knowledge communities of the Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), the UK Catapult centres and the Canadian Superclusters.
- Finally, we analyzed entrepreneurs-driven entrepreneurship ecosystem initiatives with an emphasis on market access and scaling up. These initiatives are driven by intermediary agents that improve the capabilities and general conditions for entrepreneurship. Likewise, other factors such as business creation and development support measures also seek to provide useful solutions to current social challenges. In this last section we have analyzed three other initiatives from three different areas of the world: Business Finland’s Growth Engines, Manizales-Mas in Colombia and Turkey’s SDG Impact Accelerator.
Therefore, in this study, nine public initiatives are analyzed in depth by adopting a longitudinal approach in terms of missions and based on six areas of analysis, namely the introduction and background of the initiative, its objectives and goals, the actors involved, the type of governance, the support mechanisms and the programming.
Each of the initiatives is unique in itself and presents characteristics that are very different from the rest, which are worth analyzing in detail and emphasizing as we do in the report. However, they also share some common features.
In some cases, the initiatives outsource the programming of the instruments used in the process. This can be cumbersome but is interesting to consider as it eases the administrative burden and incentivizes ecosystem coordination. Regardless of the emphasis on in-house or outsourced management practices, programming can benefit from incorporating several stages that allow for flexible reallocation of resources based on monitored performance. In line with the international trend, it would also be interesting to consider the possibility of establishing incentives and requirements for beneficiaries in other contexts within ecosystems.
Likewise, mission development is a complex process that requires the joint collaboration of various parties to achieve the desired outcome. In designing the procedures of an agency seeking to obtain and use intelligence in this process, it is very important to implement more directional, mission-oriented approaches. The reasons for selecting and prioritizing mission domains should be controlled through transparent communication among ecosystem actors. Ideally, these processes engage stakeholders in activities in which they participate jointly, but in which they not only create joint visions but also develop collaborative relationships to better address the joint challenges that arise.
It is therefore worth asking whether these innovation initiatives are an efficient and effective tool for change to address the economic, political, and social problems that arise daily in our society. Each one of them presents clear and defined goals that are already being carried out to a greater or lesser extent, thus meeting the challenges we face as a society. Every day there is more and more interest and concern worldwide to propose and carry out innovation policies that really lead us towards more inclusive and sustainable business and growth models. However, we need to invest even more in R&I and bet on mission-oriented instruments and initiatives aimed at creating systemic change in society.
You can download the full report free of charge below. For more information, please contact: info@if-institute.org.
1/2021 IFI Report - Mission-oriented Instruments
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Transformative governance of innovation ecosystems
The CEO of IFI, Totti Könnölä publishes with Aalto University professors in a leading research journal ‘Technological Forecasting and Social Change’ a paper on transformative governance of innovation ecosystems.
New lens for policy and management
The framework of transformative governance developed in the paper, offers a powerful new lens for policy and management contexts which are characterised by complexity and uncertainty, both within vertical policies (e.g. research, energy, mobility or health) as much as within more horizontal policies (e.g. entrepreneurship or innovation).
Apart from designing of specific policy measures, the framework can be harnessed for shaping the general conditions of transformative innovation policy and associated governance structures, for instance by overcoming bottlenecks related to both innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems. Furthermore, it can be used for assessing and designing policy mixes to support the development of innovation ecosystems into desired directions. In fact, we look for new collaborations to apply this framework in policy/management analysis and the design of new measures.
Transformative innovation policy
The paper addresses transformative innovation policy, which has recently emerged at the intersection of innovation and socio-technical transition research. It has provided valuable heuristics to guide policy; but it has also led to the recognition of major challenges in the management of uncertainty and complexity.
Traditional policy responses to control markets have become a source of inertia and a point of vulnerability addressing challenges associated with digital platforms, financial crises and the covid-19 pandemic as well.
In this paper, we address these challenges by linking transformative innovation policy with research perspectives from (i) complex adaptive systems, (ii) ecosystems, and (iii) adaptive and participatory governance. Specifically, we develop a conceptual framework for transformative governance.
Transformative governance
Ecosystems tend to evolve towards excessive concentration of power and techno-institutional lock-ins, on the one hand, or the dissolution of the ecosystem to fragmented and chaotic markets, on the other. To address this challenge, we develop transformative governance.
Transformative governance seeks to improve the adaptiveness and resilience of the ecosystem and orchestrates socio-technical transformation based on the balanced presence of diversity, connectivity, polycentricity, redundancy and directionality.
In effect, the framework help design and assess policy measures which exhibit the desired five features in the three succession stages, thereby fostering more balanced ecosystem development.
Case study on emerging mobility ecosystem
We present an illustrative example by applying the framework to a Finnish policy reform in which the lack of balanced attention to the ecosystem features catalysed major shortcomings in an emerging innovation mobility ecosystem. Finally, we explore the implications for the design of individual policies and policy mixes that arise from the recognition of the complexity and the holistic policy impacts on the ecosystem and society at large.
The paper results from the international Platform Value Now project, funded by Finland’s Strategic Research Council focusing on understanding the fast-emerging platform ecosystems, their value creation dynamics and requirements of the supportive institutional environment.
This paper is available here to download free of charge. For more information contact Totti Könnölä.
Könnölä et al. Transformative governance of innovation ecosystems
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Action, agency, actionable: the semantics of innovation
José Manuel Leceta, chairman of IFI Advisory Board, writes on innovation in the Spanish newspaper, CincoDías.
“… When I prefaced the book of my friend Ángel Alba ‘Minimum Viable Manual of Innovation’ (Innolandia), I pointed out my particular definition of innovation as knowledge in action. But my interest in philosophy leads me to wonder about the origin of the ideas and concepts in use. Related to action, I find an article this summer on the phenomenology of the agency function that, in its general sense, refers to one of the most important qualities of the human being: the ability to act intentionally and therefore, to achieve goals guided by reason. The semantic richness of the term is also at the base of the innovation agencies to which I have dedicated most of my professional life and which, despite their public nature, participate in an investment and business logic.
To the agency function and agencies, I would like to add in these lines the adjective actionable, which the RAE defines as: said of a mechanism, which can be operated. And this with regard to two proposals to imagine the future post-Covid-19. First of all, the 10 technologies that the Chair of the Rafael del Pino Foundation presented by the entrepreneur scientist and admirable friend Javier García Martínez, whom I met in my time at the head of the European Institute of Technology as one of the three advisers of the founding president, Martin Schuurmans… “
Read the full article in Spanish
https://cincodias.elpais.com/cincodias/2020/08/06/opinion/1596704366_711027.html
Credits foto: Manuel Lorenzo EFE