Lets focus on the bigger picture here.

Developing our knowledge and then putting it to good use gives us the potential for securing a competitive position- that goes without saying, perhaps.

Living in Europe offers us enormous history, diversity and a constant respect for the make-up of its different cultures.

Europe is a very proud continent forged from this history of competitiveness but it is grappling with its place in the global world where others seem to have a greater present-day advantage.

For many, Europe seems stalled; in jobs, growth and its future space, it seems not so sure on what and where it can effectively compete in a complex and challenging world. There are so many competing voices within, draining vital energy, while others outside Europe are getting on with the job of equipping themselves for the changes taking place to effectively compete in today’s world.

The forging of the European Union needs more ‘heat’ to meld into the force that many want, yet every time it seems to be getting to that required temperature for effecting a real change, someone or something comes along and throws ‘cold water’ on it.

“Herding cats”

Perhaps that idiomatic saying of “herding cats” summarizes many of the discussions and debates that often occur all over Europe, offering up their part of the solution to what seems to me, increasingly an intractable problem. There is this ongoing attempt to control or organize what seems intent on staying uncontrollable or chaotic.

It just seems incredibly difficult to get the required direction or united determination to channel ‘our’ energies, perhaps impossible is a growing feeling that is fuelling even more the nationalistic pride built from centuries of disputes and disagreements in alternating alliances of the day.

Europe in whatever eventual union or collection of entities needs to stop focusing inward as that seems simply not to help. It needs to look outward and recognize the challenges it needs to go after and organize around, that shift the ground it competes on, so it can offer the foundations to build from for many of these individual voices to unite to move all those concerns that need clarity, work and a sense of clear direction. We are focusing on the right aspects to unite behind, to identify with and combine our unique resources.

At present we are all pulling in our own directions, to secure our own piece of the declining economic pie and that is undermining any ability for improved performance.

“Fiddling while Rome burns”

You do get this sense we enjoy “crisis and opportunity”. The institutions and bodies that are set up to lay out the broad direction within the EU, start with good intention and then occupy themselves with a host of unimportant or less important matters and neglect priorities during a crisis. They get lost in the details, determined to defend and spend the budgets and lose sight of the need for clear commercial or social outcomes.

The source of this “fiddling while Rome burns” is the story that Nero played the fiddle (violin) while Rome burned, during the great fire in AD 64. The flaw in this was there was no such instrument as the fiddle (violin) invented in first-century Rome. Equally the events of a fire have been constructed in all the rivalries and conflicting accounts that came after. I get a sense of this today within the EU, we are failing to orchestrate even the violin player, everyone is playing their own tune!

Europe stands at a real crossroads today, where it travels determines its future

It can stay locked up in conflicts, often chaotic decision-making, in its many disputes and simmering rivalries or it can learn from those events across its history and find a different path.

I doubt that path is integration of countries, even freedom of movement or common currencies or a given language. These are ideals suffering from imposition yet we can integrate and combine in ways that allow us as individuals to prosper and grow but also to unite in projects and across challenges that deliver a more promising future.

Grand challenges we can unite behind.
These come from the challenges that should be of the uttermost importance to our future well-being:
1. The long drawn out integrating the digital infrastructure across Europe to bring down the present barriers and allow less of a divide across Europe.
2. The ability to connect across a European energy grid that delivers on security, and is moving purposefully towards clean and efficient alternatives that are economically viable alternatives.
3. The formation of a scientific research community
4. The harmonization of intellectual property to accelerate invention not just protect it
5. The overhaul to our educational system to deliver the required skills we need for the future not based on the past.
6. Putting in place the roadmap to renewables that give investment confidence
7. Adding even more momentum towards key-enabling technologies
8. Having a reusable framework that reduces the ‘throw-away’ culture and mind-set
9. Tackle health and wellbeing in clear, coordinated and integrated ways across all.
10. Redoubling the efforts on food security, sustainable agriculture and land and sea management through a greater agricultural revolution.

I could add a few more but these are all ‘big bites’. We should possible go back to the approach to EU flagship programmes where the big agenda gets the required focus from politicians, bureaucrats, business and our institutions, at every level and engaging in meaningful ways with our broader society, then we are achieving more in ‘common cause’ and integration than where we have been heading recently.

We should push the EU agenda towards delivering integrated models to offer new value and opportunities, the innovation part, as central to achieving the need for new growth and jobs.

These big challenges give us our future, they break down the barriers, they open up our minds to what is the real borders to protect, to push out towards in different ways If we can unlock the barriers and ring-fencing on many of these that are the blocks today, we are laying in the foundation for growth and jobs.

There is nothing new in this appeal but the speed of change occurring outside Europe requires us to shift internal disputes and channel this energy into resolving the big challenges.

Europe needs to shoot for a different moon.

Structural issues are longstanding, we are attempting to protect far too much, we are falling to move towards a ‘creative destruction’ where innovation-lead solutions provide the better alternative in growth and challenge We link to these common causes as they benefit the individual, as well as the communities we are in (national, local, scientific, educational etc).

The push for a common market of ideas and knowledge that are allowed to flow

I detect some positive movement in seizing some of these outstanding big challenges in the way the European Commission is being set up and structured. The new commission structure is pointing to big issues; it is veering away from past integration mantras, wanting to deliver on some of these challenges suggested above.

I just hope it does not extend the list too much or we go down the path of dilution, spreading and stretching our capabilities and resources too thin and ending up with the usual past compromises, all wrought out in eleventh hour late-night deals. Of course this is perhaps wishful thinking and certainly early days.

Can we move out of our fiscal consolidation mind-set? We must

As we continue to have fiscal consolidation, we get rising Euroscepticism. We nibble away not so much at the edges we are actually attacking our core and this is where we are facing the defence of knowledge assets and finding ways to promote by, perhaps, uniting behind our bigger EU challenges.

So where does innovation fit, I’d say front and centre. Every conversation in every boardroom, in every political meeting, at each EU summit and discussion, it is the outcomes we await to hear. These need to be far more centred around innovation in the outcome, not just in nice declarations with little behind them but in cohesive plans that move us towards this agenda of tackling the ‘Big Challenge Agenda’

Scaling and building innovation waves

We need to scale and create the positive waves through innovation. Reality is not in what is going on inside Europe, it is what is happening elsewhere. It is the organization of those knowledge assets to scale and develop the waves of innovation that Asia and America are clustering around in better ways than in Europe.

These can be seen in numerous ways as geographical regions all look for ways to become the dominant force for innovation. Asia, especially China is testing that existing dominance and Europe and others in the West need to embrace that challenge, not attempt to defend against it in legislative efforts but in this necessary knowledge asset re-equipping.

Keeping innovation high on the EU agenda but in new bigger ways
Innovation features higher in national policy than ever before in many parts of the world. Let us all hope Europe does not drop the innovation ball, but cutting its commitments to what has already been hard-fought over, delivered in the Horizon 2020 programme.

Equally let’s not dilute its effort and whittle away its value in thousands of small, perhaps meaningless gestures built on political threat and fragmented thinking.

Getting Europe moving again will need a much bolder vision and then stay focused on funding it if it links into these grand challenges in clear or valuable (experimental) ways that can be a catalyst for others to pick up and run with over the next mile, as innovation is not a sprint, it is a marathon to run, at this big challenge level.

Who is that knocking on my door?
* China has set itself some ambitious innovation targets, in its production of patents, in producing more PhD’s in science and engineering than US institutions or European ones and twice as many undergraduates in these fields than the US.
* China is going about outpacing the US in investments in research and development, it is growing R&D expenditure by 15 to 20% per year, not just to catch up but to drive innovation into its future.
* Asia and America invest more than Europe in R&D at the ratio of 3:3:2. The technology-intensive activity in the Asian region is fast approaching that of North America and Western Europe.
* China’s invention initiatives are producing rapid results as the government seeks increasing actively in cooperation’s with its Asian competitors. Asian countries are mutually fuelling one another’s innovative success
* The precise impact of Asia’s IP expansion is impossible to predict. But its transformative potential is obvious as the commissioners of the patent offices of Japan, South Korea, China and, to a lesser extent, Singapore and Taiwan meet increasingly to define and coordinate their intellectual property (IP) policies although a number of territorial disputes and political divides do often get in the way.

Each of these examples is building future knowledge assets to unlock innovation potential.

* America equally continues to work through a clearer innovation framework than I feel we in Europe seem not to have, or it seems incapable of delivering in our current fragmented view of innovation understanding. We want to spread innovation either too thinly or distort its value and meaning. We need a clear overarching innovation message.
* Take the reports from the “NII Innovate America Council on Competitiveness” or the White House view on “A Strategy for American Innovation” as debate documents or guidance indicators that offer an overarching view of how innovation needs to work and on what is needed to achieve and maintain a competitive position for America, written by both Business leaders and Government officials.

So what’s next?
The European Union has consistently failed to exploit its potential for innovation-based growth. Europe remains less inter-connected in critical areas due to political grandstanding and catering to vested domestic interests.

Does Europe lack the capacity for change as we constantly fail to convert much that seems promising, we are often not commercializing on all our hard work? Others pick up the baton and make the ‘risk’ investments off of the work and initial investments in Europe.

We constantly get caught up in the politics of the day, that seem to continue to divide and rule in old fashion ways, yet technology, science, and innovation are moving at a force and speed we are often guilty of not appreciating its impact or wealth-creating prospective. Innovation does not respect borders, it seamlessly moves across them but we need to forge the infrastructure to allow it to flow in more efficient and effective ways.

It is high time we did understand the real value of innovation, it ‘touches’ us all, we can all ‘feed off it’. We need to mobile around innovation and find the right ways to release our knowledge assets that are residing across Europe in a myriad of guises, waiting for the organizing forces and challenges to unite behind and solve.

We have the latent capability clearly.

**Note : A really useful source of knowledge is this overview of the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators 2014 highlights some major developments in international and U.S. science and engineering (S&E) that explores many useful indicators in the race of Science, Research and Technology. It’s worth a read.

The post The Real Race is to Invest in Knowledge Assets and Grand Innovation Challenges first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Regretfully the next Titanic is waiting to happen.

In recent months there has been considerable activity to formulate the new policies to support innovation through EU funding. The EU has been inviting dialogue and offering a mountain of guidelines and suggestions to help us all.  Much of the focus is on streamlining what is already in place.

I’ve called this on some different discussion blogs a little like “reorganizing the innovation deck chairs on the titanic as it heads towards an iceberg”.

There is enormous activity and pressure to perform as the past results of many of the EU initiatives have not delivered on the goals set, and there is this real urgent need to reflect upon the lessons learned from the failures of the Lisbon strategy.

It does seem the present ‘effect’ is put on more steam, lighten the load where we can and let’s try and navigate through these challenges (or icebergs), no time to lose.

Everyone is on high alert in Brussels and around the EU all busy doing their job to contribute to present dialogues on making innovation a success. We need to take really radical action in my view.

Perhaps we should be shouting “all stop”

Maybe we should be shouting “all stop.” Can we keep going on layering more onto a system of innovation that has not worked in many cases or provide even further policies that clearly do not fit the order of magnitude of change taking place around innovation?

We are simply shuffling the innovation deckchairs and this is not going to be enough to confront the new global innovation changes taking place. The ones that are slow to respond, regretfully the EU is a shining example of that, that lacks that real agility to read, react and respond (more the later ones, better at the reading ones in the EU’s case) is simply going to consistently lag and not lead in the new global innovation race. Can we afford that?

The EU needs to be bolder in its innovation agenda for a number of reasons:

• It does not have low costs, abundant labour resources and a pricing advantage against many of its competitors. It has to leverage different competencies for advantage.
• The world is more interconnected and competitive than ever before and harnessing 27 odd members onto the same view is ‘herculean’ irrespective of the issue.
• Other nations are rapidly replicating any competitive advantage quicker than before,
• The infinite global creative workforce is forcing everyone to go where the resource (human, knowledge or natural) lies to gain economic advantage. Innovation does not respect borders.
• The multiple converging forces, perhaps a new infliction point, is, I feel, actually happening. Society is gaining empowerment and possessing the tools to shape and influence. The consumer or individual voice is growing and organizing in new ways that will radically change, in collaboration and influence.

When you are progressively stripped of those traditional past bastions of advantage, innovation needs to become THE essential core competence to survive and thrive, to respond and build around. It seems we all at least agree on that, the issue is how to go about it is where we diverge.

Stepping back is stepping up

The EU must pull back. It simply can’t continue to design, manage, fund, lead, guide and judge as an ‘all-in-one’ for innovation. It needs to stand well back. It needs to revert to what Governments or Institutions like the EU should be:  the providers of the essential backbone, the infrastructure and clear the path to allow all others to find their way.

It should set out the big challenges, the societal challenges, which in all fairness the EU is doing, and set about laying in this backbone or foundation for others to work from.

Innovation Business and Social Platform Ecosystems

My view as a serious proposal is to build multiple Innovation Businesses and Social Platform Ecosystems as part of this different thinking needed.
The EU needs to tap into the combination of strengths within the different regions for them to coalesce around the notion of Innovation Business Platform Ecosystems.

It is partly developing the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) that are increasingly available, combining these with the social media platforms so a greater number of parties are working on the solutions and challenges required to resolve these BIG societal challenges.

This will be based on these eco-platform BIG challenges in an open collaboration forum where a number of different stakeholders (or actors) who have potentially different business & social model needs can come together.

The scale and scope of ecosystem platforms can become the fuel of energy, knowledge, specialisation, and collaborative know-how for innovation to happen, that provides benefits and value to each person or entity that participates.

The Government or EU  provides the necessary support and investment into this ‘innovation backbone’ to enable distributed organisational models based so interaction and collaboration can go on and looks to clear the way for the successful delivery of personalized high-margin products/services that leverage local identity and economic structure.

Measuring Innovation Ecosystems

The aim fits the EU objectives, that is to foster an inclusive and participative society, grow wealth within the community, and create jobs which support broader economic inclusion.  These ecosystems empower the creativity and the participation of all potential participants of EU regions (public and private organizations, small and micro enterprises, communities, universities, institutions, individuals and the critical final consumer) in open socio-economic processes.

Specifically, the EU or the separate Governments can measure progress

I’d argue we should forget the old measuring system of the 20th century, hungover from the manufacturing of measuring inputs, processes, outputs, it gets too complicated. The only one I’d always keep is outcomes, as the only real measure of (commercial) progress, something the EU admits it is not good at doing- generating successful commercial outcomes.

I’d radically measure innovation differently, through:

Innovation linkages– the productivity of relationships, alliance collaborations achieved, interactions taking place, the forming of new knowledge networks, clusters and sharing of complementary assets. It evaluates the different intersections to spot new possibilities

Knowledge diffusion– the content, its value, its adoption rates and absorptive capacity within and outside the ecosystem for accessing knowledge, anchoring it (within the EU) and diffusing it on a broader scale. It can also judge knowledge response (learning).

Intangible assets– it can promote intellectual capital and facilitate long term support for innovative solutions that look promising. It can re-equip people, the most intangible element to manage better within these ecosystems.

Improve the conditions for innovation to grow– by monitoring the dynamics within these ecosystem platforms (demand, impact on society, adoption/ diffusion, skill obsolescence etc) where the commission plays the role of lead policy influencer.

Do innovation ecosystems answer all the problems?
No of course not, but it fundamentally challenges the way we are currently doing things and dismantles the way innovation is being managed today, in silos and within national boundaries.

With intervention constantly taking place at central levels is to influence, yet it regretfully constrains much about innovation today. It is not intended but clearly happening. We need to unblock these constraints and take innovation to the next level.

Innovation thrives by allowing the energy to flow in as close a natural state as it can, fewer rules, fewer boundaries, and higher uncertainty but contained within a given universe. It cannot be tied to increasing complexity, rules and guidelines, even ‘unnatural’ innovation country borders.

The policymaker should play their new part to help to lay out the vision, the mission and provide the enabling resources to best achieve improvement for society and economic wealth, and then get out of the way of the actual process as much as possible, unless it has a clear role to provide part of the core enabling factors.

The main EU/ government role is simply to ‘fuel’ the ecosystem where it can, both in the challenges that need resolution and in providing the backbone of the system to facilitate it, not as many feel today, to direct and police it.

Be bolder EU please, our innovative future depends on it.

Maybe wishful thinking but fiddling with those innovation policy deck chairs knowing what is coming towards me is far scarier. We need to be bolder in our innovative thinking not simply rearrange and streamline the existing activities.

Innovation dynamics have simply changed. Innovation Platform Ecosystems need serious consideration to change the innovation dynamics within Europe.

The post Transform European activities around innovation ecosystems first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.