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: 

1. Co-Creation: co-design by the users and the producers; 
2. Exploration: discovering of emerging usages, behaviours and market opportunities; 
3. Experimentation: implementing live scenarios within the user communities; 
4. 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).

The smart cities/communities are living spaces where people decided to improve the quality of life by using modern ICT-based tools in order to form a better interaction with each other and optimize the use of energy, materials, services and finances.

E-institute is one of the pioneers in Slovenia as regards introducing the smart cities. The UPSIDE project (FP7) is the first Smart City project in Slovenia establishing smart city in Maribor and transferring good practices from Germany, Sweden, Netherlands and Denmark.

Regarding lack of large cities in Slovenia, the future orientation will be towards smaller smart cities, smart regions, smart communities and smart villages.

Climate roadmap for the city of Ptuj (2.0 Mb)

Attached documents

Podnebni kažipot SI-OK

Podnebni kažipot ANG-OK

In a low-carbon society we will live and work in low-energy and low-emission buildings with intelligent heating and cooling systems. We will drive electric and hybrid cars and live in cleaner cities with less air pollution and better public transport. The energy will be produced only from the renewable sources using wind, water, sun and geothermal energy. By achieving all this, Europe will become more competitive, energy independent as well as more healthy place to live.

However, there is a long path to achieve this kind of future. To keep the climate change below 2˚C the whole world will have to reduce its carbon footprint by 50% compared to 1990. Europe has set high goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95% by 2050.

The key challenges are sustainable transport, smart grids, energy efficiency, sustainable construction, smart financing schemes and low carbon innovation. Resource efficiency and environmental protection go hand in hand with sustainable energy challenges. But, as always, the citizens’ responsibility toward the environment will decide success or failure.    

Many technologies exist today, but need to be promoted and developed further. Organizational innovations, for example, cooperatives and energy-balanced communities will become increasingly important in the following years. Smart multi-model transport and new organizational solutions will play an important role in achieving low emissions in this sector. Energy efficiency innovations and their market uptake will be crucial for energy efficiency. An additional understanding of barriers and drivers, motivation factors enabling energy efficiency and energy efficient behaviour will be needed to establish alow-carbon society of the future.

One of the key areas of excellence of E-institute is implementing the sustainability impact assessments for integration of objects into the living spaces.

The existing methods of environmental impact assessment are becoming outdated, since they do not appropriately weight all aspects. Consequently, the public is not fully satisfied, and this trend is becoming more and more evident with the changes of modern society and the use of modern ICT-based social platforms.

To overcome these imbalances we have developed a unique method of sustainability impact assessment, where all aspects are put into one matrix by using multi-criteria analysis and multi-stakeholder cooperation. The results are remarkable and are placing the sustainability impact assessment back to the EU agenda. We strongly believe the Aarhus Convention of ensuring access to environmental information and public participation in decision making should be taken more seriously and one of the possible improvements could be the use of sustainability impact assessment for integration of objects into the living spaces. 

E-institute is cooperating with International Hydropower Association in trainings for implementation of the Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol.