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Transforming Innovation Ecosystems

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Is it possible to achieve smart specialization?

Juan Mulet Melia, a member of the Innovation Council of IFI, and Totti Könnölä, CEO of the Insight Foresight Institute (IFI), write in Cinco Días, one of the leading economic journals in Spain, to promote smart specialization in the regions.

The aim of any policy to promote innovation is to make more innovative companies, and those that already are, to address innovations that generate greater added value. An innovative company sees innovation as one of its operations in pure business logic. However, companies that are not innovative consider that it does not compensate them to assume the inherent risk of any innovation. For this reason, innovation policies will only be effective when they are able to reduce the technological, commercial, organizational or financial risk acceptable.
Two are the ways in which policies to promote innovation are usually pursued. One, of general application, is financial aid, which must be sufficient to make the risk acceptable to a company that feels averse to innovation. The safest way to waste public money is to design financial policies for innovation with scarce resources.
The second path is to facilitate access to the technologies needed to develop innovations. If there are already sources of adequate technology, this path will be less expensive, but only reduce the technological risk, leaving intact commercial, organizational and financial…

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Image: Gitty Images / Cinco Dias

IFI at the Conference on “New Innovation models in the European Industry”

The Center for Industrial Technological Development (CDTI) and Zabala Innovation Consulting have organized on June 1, 2017 in the Hall of the Center for Industrial Technological Development (CDTI) the Conference “New Innovation Models in the European Industry”. The event aimed to showcase the most relevant systems and innovation models of European industry. Totti Könnölä, CEO of the Insight Foresight Institute, talked about innovation ecosystems.

The conference has been organized as part of the European project “Industrial Innovation in Transition” which aims to analyze on the one hand the best and most advanced practices of innovation that are giving in European industry, and by others and the administrations are providing appropriate policies and solutions to support companies in the adoption and use of practice names.

The event is aimed at any organization interested in learning new models of innovation.

Link to the report

Link to full program

Policy Experimentation for Pan-European Entrepreneurial Innovation Ecosystems

José Manuel Leceta, General Manager of Red.es, and Totti Könnölä, CEO of Insight Foresight Institute write on their experiences on the EIT. The article was presented in the seminar  “Growth ecosystems as a tool in the new industrial and innovation policy” organised by by SITRA and Ministry of Economy and Employment of Finland.

Established economies face major challenges in renewing their industrial basis, apparent in Europe that is struggling over decades in turning research into innovation. Policy experimentation in the periphery of government and power structures may offer opportunities for radically new policy and governance models and practices. Herein, the ‘European Institute of Innovation and Technology’ (EIT) is a relatively new policy experiment for entrepreneurial innovation. Created in 2008, the EIT operates through socalled ‘Knowledge and Innovation Communities’ (KICs) which integrate partners from the Knowledge Triangle of higher education, research and business, encompassing bottomup ‘co-creation’ of novel innovation models for Pan-European entrepreneurial innovation ecosystems. While the high political profile of the EIT has constrained partly its freedom to experiment, European-wide networked excellence approach and business logic in managing KICs has created new insights on experimental governance models to be explored further. Building on action research case study the paper codifies some of these developments and opens up an avenue for further work on the experimental governance of Pan-European entrepreneurial innovation ecosystems.

Link to the complete document

IFI in the Finnish policy research seminar: Growth ecosystems as an innovation policy tool

The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation TEKES and the Finnish Innovation Fund SITRA organised in autumn 2016 an international workshop to compile international research data on developing ecosystems. Totti Könnölä, CEO of Insight Foresight Institute, presented the paper “Co-creating Pan-European Innovation Ecosystems: reflections from the EIT”.

Competition in the global economy has increasingly become a battle between various networks or ecosystems. Companies can often no longer be competitive just using their own know-how. Instead, and in addition to their own competitive advantages, they need the benefits offered by strong partners. Such partners may include other companies and public sector or civil society organisations. Various business incubators, business accelerators and organisations specialising in promoting the use of various technologies may have an important role as platforms for testing, developing and distributing new ideas.

See all the papers presented in the seminar.