Innovation is to make things happen. The faster the better, the success rate counts, the speed counts. Related to innovation is the courage to experiment and to find the unexpected. It is not a linear extrapolation of the past, it can contain those components, but it is much more complex.
When we look at traditional policy makers, still in most of the documents we see the thinking of linear innovation models, applied research, industrial research deployment. But actually in very few cases that is valid. In some disciplines you have it, but what is more important is that you grow a lot of seed to be harvested, to be mashed-up, to be interlinked into the innovation process.
From that perspective, the EC tries to push for new kinds of understanding innovation: user-centric, user-driven innovation, open innovation and looking at that from an experimental mash-up perspective.
VUCATIONAL society -- How to prepare ourselves for a society that is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. This means that we cannot predict the future. We can catalyse and make qualified guesses. It is also important to notice that we don’t have necessarily time to do analyses anymore.
The same is reflected in enterprise structures. When looking at modern enterprises, we should not even speak about networked enterprises anymore. It is really grabbing on those competences which are needed at the moment. It is more opportunistic than any time before.
Then, looking at the dimension of crowds in innovation. It is important to seek the extraordinary. When you ask experts on solutions for a problem, you get a very good convergence, because they are very much the solutions monoculture; monodiscipline and based on the past experiences. However, what is interesting, are the extremes. There are several studies showing that if you ask experts you have a high number of rather well converged answers, which are relatively high value to solve the problem. But, if you go to the crowds, you actually get from the crowd a higher number of those solutions which are of extremely high value. Of course, from a policy perspective it is very interesting to look at that area of interest where the crowd can provide higher value solutions for the problem than the experts.
How to make that happen? According to a MIT study from 2002, you have a clearly higher probability to have breakthrough innovations if you have a diverse research group. Again, diversity matters. This is also why the crowd can provide higher value solutions than the masses of experts.
Based on that, we need to seriously think about two new professions: curators, who take care of the contents, and bridgers, who are inherently curious about absolutely everything and make the connections between disciplines, stakeholders and make the ignition for innovation.
How to make it happen, how to validate those, is very much on experimentation. We need to have real world experiments, designed in the research policy programmes, which very soon reveal whether a solution is failing or whether it is scalable. And if it is scalable, we scale it up fast; and if it is not scalable, we kill them fast, without investing a lot of money in the wrong direction.
Based on this, it is possible to sketch different pictures of innovation ecosystems. It is important not to look at the traditional enterprise public-private-partnership-types of models, but also at all kinds of competences, including the civic society as important player in there.
In terms of the paradigm change of innovation, the EC is trying to move towards an open innovation 2.0 where we try to break the boundaries between disciplines, between different stakeholders, where we push for genuine quadruple helix innovation, orchestration rather than control, where we go beyond the “out-of-the-box”-thinking. We don’t need any boxes at all.
We can imagine the European Innovation System as a kettle, where the public sector is providing the kettle, and the energy, the fire, whether it is research funding or policy funding, procurement etc., and the public sector is taking care of all the ingredients in the kettle, but not determining a priori what kind of soup or regional flavour it will contain. We should create ecosystems with the ingredients, creating those coalitions and have all the players on board.