Growing interest towards the IIT preliminary results on high level forums

Our Horizon 2020 project ’Industrial Innovation in Transition’ has now proceeded to the analysis phase and the first findings are now available. But first it’s important to express our thanks to all of you who made it possible that we finally were able to interview 700 companies in 11 EU countries. Our interview data is unique in terms of its size and breadth and will provide an endless opportunity for the academic community as well as for industry to learn how we can improve the competitiveness in Europe.

          

In order to give some hints of the preliminary findings we have been able to notice that the ecosystem game has become a key element of industrial innovation and companies are developing their ability to play the game in their ecosystems. Open innovation is widely considered and discussed in industry, but there seem be some challenges to use this new concept in practice. Comprehensive business environment analysis a key enabler for successful innovation. The tool box seems to be wide and public research institutions seem to play an important role in addition to more traditional methods such as market analysis, patent analysis and horizon scanning. Some of the most interesting findings was that competence and skills are the most important drivers of innovation and that collaboration with public research is getting increasingly important to fill gaps in the required knowledge pool. In September we had pleasure to discuss the findings with our advisory board in Vienna. The first full analysis of the findings will be available later this year.

We have also been able to present some of our first findings in conferences. In July we had a full session on Industrial innovation in the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) Conference where our Manchester team presented the first findings and we had a full panel discussion on the results with representatives of Siemens and the EU Commission. The discussion raised a great deal of questions and remarks from the audience and a number of countries expressed their interest to continue the dialogue. Another event where I had a change to represent the project was the OECD BlueSky3 conference in September. Again the response was most encouraging and a number of new avenues to continue discussion were opened. My experience from these discussions was that we really have been able to hit a key issue which is now high on the agenda of both industry and governments.

We will continue our dissemination efforts by participating widely in the debate on industrial innovation and innovation policy in a number of events both at the national and international levels. We believe sincerely that our project will make a difference in generating new insight into industrial innovation and innovation policy formulation.

Erkki Ormala