Dear Peter Drucker Forum participants,
I am very happy to bring to you the greetings from the European innovation perspective.
The theme of the 6th Global Peter Drucker Forum is The Great Transformation for which innovation and in particular its opening up and broadening plays a key role. We are indeed at a turning point - using President Juncker's words - "A new Start for Europe" with ten policy priority areas.
From those ten I would like to highlight three areas as most relevant ones for this Forum:
New boost for Jobs, Growth and Investment. The new Commission's Jobs, Growth and Investment package will focus on cutting regulation, making smarter use of existing financial resources and making flexible use of public funds. The aim is to provide up to 300 billion Euro as additional private and public investment over the next three years.
The second area that contributes directly to the Great Transformation is Connected Digital Single Market. By fostering a digital single market we can create up to 250 Billion Euro in additional growth, see hundreds of thousands of new jobs to emerge, and establish a vibrant knowledge-based society. All this implies infrastructure investments, but also ambitious legislative actions on European level.
As the third area I would like to mention Deeper and Fairer Internal Market with a Strengthened Industrial Base. It has clear targets on growing industrial weight by improving business environment, easing access to markets and finance, and ensuring the proper skills base.
There is a new approach to address the innovation challenge: The new 80 Billion Euro research framework of the European Commission, the Horizon 2020, has clearly shifted from supporting research to incorporate research, development and innovation in integrated way. In many of the areas we call for seamless involvement of all stakeholders: the industry, users, research institutions and the public sector.
The Commissioner for the Digital Economy and Society Gunther Oettinger highlights the radical change by saying: "We are in the midst of a revolution. Digital technologies are changing the world and our lives completely."
This great transformation is changing innovation paradigms and processes as well. Closed, linear innovation models are replaced by open innovation ecosystems where mash-up of different disciplines and technologies mix in real world settings with experimentation and prototyping.
Questions the great transformation brings for you as thought leaders are.
How to drive, create new markets seamlessly with all stakeholders i.e. Industry, Universities, Government and Citizens (the so called quadruple helix for innovation). We have seen how industries such as banking, music, and books have been transformed through digital technologies but the challenges of transforming our cities, our energy grids, our transportation systems will be much more complex and required a different kind of coordinated approach.
How to involve the customers, the end-users seamlessly from the very beginning? Again, how to create the new markets, to play a win-more win-more game instead of the traditional win-lose games on existing markets only?
What about how to change our management culture towards orchestration of competencies, to make them play in tune together, irrespective of organisational boundaries? Is leadership enough?
How will the winning enterprises capture the power of crowds? How will they position themselves in modern open innovation ecosystems? And how will they capture the creativity and commons in the society to improve their performance?
Will you as thought leaders take the challenge to ignite innovation between the stakeholders, disciplines and the society?
The European Commission DG CONNECT's Open Innovation Strategy and Policy Group of which Richard Straub was a co-founder consists of important members ranging from Intel, IBM, Nokia, SAP to BMW. Under the chairmanship of Martin Curley from Intel it has conceptualised this new innovation paradigm as Open Innovation 2.0.
In order to drive concrete implementation of Open Innovation 2.0 in Europe the OISPG has published the Dublin Innovation declaration formulated at the inaugural Open Innovation 2.0 conference held under the auspices of the Irish Presidency of the EU– (leaflets of the declaration are available at the Drucker Society Stand at the conference location). With Open Innovation 2.0 the European Commission embraces a more systemic innovation approach with co-creation, quadruple helix interaction and a full ecosystem perspective at its core. It attempts to morph the European Research Area into a more holistic European Innovation Ecosystem.
Europe cannot just save its way out of stagnation – it must innovate towards a better future. We hope that with policy actions that are inspired by Peter Drucker’s seminal thinking about innovation and the new open innovation 2.0 paradigm we can not only plant the seeds for growth, jobs and widespread prosperity, but fertilize, feed and harvest them as well.
Thank you for your attention!