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.
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”.
IFI co-authored a book that sets out the elements for the design of a streamlined and future-proof policy on innovation and entrepreneurship in Europe. It is the result of a collective effort led by CEPS, which formed a Task Force on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the EU, composed of authoritative scholars, industry experts, entrepreneurs, practitioners and representatives of EU and international institutions. The result of these deliberations is a set of policy recommendations aimed at improving the overall environment and approach for entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe and a new paradigmatic understanding of the role that innovation and entrepreneurship can and should play within the overall context of EU policy. These recommendations are based on a new, multi-dimensional approach to both innovation and entrepreneurship as social phenomena and to the policies that are meant to promote them.
Luis Delgado and Totti Könnölä (CEO of IFI) write in the EAIE Magazine on the role of international officers in Spanish universities. The analysis of job offers for international officers in higher education in Spain leads to the conclusion that their main goal is to support the recruitment of international students. They often work within recruitment teams, managing sales channels for specific regions to fulfil the university´s recruitment objectives. Nowadays, however, the concept of internationalisation of higher education should go far beyond student recruitment, the mere mobility of student, or the signing of international agreements. There is much more to a career in international higher education!
The co-founder of IFI, Totti Könnölä co-authored the European Foresight Platform brief on the foresight programme, of which overall objective was to enhance innovation-driven sustainable economic development of the Antofagasta region in Chile. The main purposes of the foresight
