New Innovation Trends
Within the last years society has been changing more rapidly as ever before in human history. The innovation is rapidly becoming a key strategic driver for all organizations. The society is moving from hierarchical and controlled toward such, where the citizen empowerment together with value-based communities will have a profound role.
However, most organizations seem to struggle with an understanding what is stopping them from being more innovative, and how to move forward on their journey toward innovation.
The most critical factor for success is to understand the citizens as active players and not as objects as they were perceived before. The concept of open innovation involves all the actors in the innovation ecosystems, including end-users and communities that are brought together to share experiences, information and best practices and to build cross-disciplinary alliances. A successful innovation approach of the future will have to be multidisciplinary, hybrid, highly creative and inclusive.
Multidyscinnovation
The first step toward the innovation is to trigger the Socrates syndrome: organizations that are unconsciously incompetent have to become consciously incompetent. Then everything becomes easier.
A closed innovation from last century has been replaced with the concept of open innovation. Since the society is moving fast, new innovation methods are invented. The innovation world develops as fast as the society, therefore we are introducing a new concept named multidyscinnovation, where dy stands for changing variables, necessary for constant updating of modern innovation concepts. The innovation ecosystems of the future will still be focused on co-creation process, but they will have to take meta-challenges into consideration. New hybrid forms of complex innovation process will be developed by inventing new structures, processes, partnership programmes and new ICT solutions. The winners will be chosen among the groups of non-competitor companies, who will be able to collaborate across the sectors and establish complex multi-partner, comprehensive projects based on human touch and high ethical standards.
What is a Living Lab?
A Living Lab is a real-life test and an experimentation environment where the users and the producers co-create innovations. The living labs have been characterised by the European Commission as Public-Private-People Partnerships (PPPP) for user-driven open innovation. The Living Lab employs four main activities:
- Co-Creation: co-design by the users and the producers;
- Exploration: discovering of emerging usages, behaviours and market opportunities;
- Experimentation: implementing live scenarios within the user communities;
- Evaluation: assessment of concepts, products and services according to socio-ergonomic, socio-cognitive and socio-economic criteria.
E-institute is a member of ENoLL (European Network of Living Labs) and SNoLL (Slovenian Network of Living Labs).