Open European Innovation Network

This blog post is a draft response to “Section 4 Implementation / Section 4.1 Coherence and Effectiveness of Work Plan / Section 4.1.2 Description of Deliverables and Timeframe” in the technical annex of the planned COST 2019 Open Call Proposal Reference: OC-2019-1-23678 "Open European Network for Enterprise Innovation in High Value Manufacturing (ENTOV-HVM)". The image shows a fishbowl to exemplify the living labs framework used to support the deliverables (retrieved from http://www.thefeelgoodlifestyle.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/fishbowl_goldfish.jpg ). Intended deliverables are: • Joint Research-Industry Workshops: Annual short term scientific missions at each of the proposer institutions in COST Target Inclusiveness Countries in the form of one day joint research-industry workshops consisting of an introduction / update to project progress (1 hour), a local industry keynote speaker from a high value manufacturing organization discussing the role of innova...

Shocking thought from a classical perspective - the ENTOV-HVM effort is PUBLIC DOMAIN (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain ). This means that, unless explicitly classified differently, no exclusive intellectual property rights apply to any of the ENTOV-HVM creative works since they are being expressly waived by their contributors. The reason for this is that the concept of intellectual property (IP) is fundamentally a relict of the industrial economy and not feasible for the knowledge based economy. While IP mechanisms do exist in various forms that try to address this, in the end we see that they either cannot be enforced legally or it is simply not feasible to do so. Why try to protect something that by default has a nature that cannot be protected? Specifically, for ENTOV-HVM, this is because the "unique" value is the ability to collaborate at disruptive speed - collaboration is human and you cannot "legally" protect the quality of a...

Based on multiple discussions this post is intended to provide some orientation regarding HOW to create a very first view of the innovation web in order to “tee off” the process of nurturing an innovation from ideation through commercialization using the concept of innovation web. The image shows a high level example of this using the network member www.entovation.com which represents a network of innovators in their own right. The image consists of the results from a crawl of the www.entovation.com site in order to identify all URLs up to three levels down. The crawl was completed using the EF Webcrawler 0.3.2 tool and the results then imported to Gephi 0.9.2 for visualization as a network with 518 nodes (webpages of organizations) and 798 edges (URLs). The graphical representation of white on black was chosen to exemplify that collaboration lets relationships “glow” like a constellation of stars. Each node / organization was then classified at a high level based on the ...

The approach chosen by ENTOV-HVM to tackle the challenge of massively increasing innovation speed in high value manufacturing is innovative and indeed disruptive in comparison to contemporary approaches because it focuses on nurturing the purposeful behavior of participants through an evolving series of archetypal collaboration patterns from ideation through commercialization.  This nurturing is termed “web weaving” and uses value network paradigms to ensure that the tangible and intangible exchanges between participants of key roles at various stages of the innovation process are occurring in an optimal overall manner.  By focusing on serving the human interactions and exchanges needed at the various stages of the innovation process the foundation is set for significantly accelerating the speed of innovation based on the analogy to how incident response teams like firefighters or emergency surgery teams are able to perform. This is considered as innovative because ...

In support of its vision ENTOV-HVM is preparing a core offering that will be suited for funding application to multiple EU research programmes. The core offering will be adapted to meet eligibility requirements of multiple programmes and a mixture of funding resources created to cover required salaries at participating institutions, networking / training costs and work package efforts by the various contribution roles. The overall aim will be gaining support for a five (5) year programme consisting of about 30 organizations from 15 countries (including  at least 8 COST Inclusiveness Target Countries) with an expected budget of about €15m budget. Potentially suitable EU research programme opportunities are:   Horizon 2020 INNOSUP: The Horizon 2020 INNOSUP programme aims to test new approaches for better innovation support through funding opportunities for innovation actors across Europe ( https://ec.europa.eu/easme/en/innosup ) European Cooperation in Scienc...

Did you know that it takes several months to a year to find, implement and benefit from a manufacturing innovation? Experience however shows that if you can´t get it done in under 3 months, it will not really get done. In this respect innovation speed is THE dominant success factor. From a visioning perspective, what if we could innovate our manufacturing shop floors in REAL-TIME? The journey to real-time innovation on manufacturing shop floors is a complex one and builds on a robust tribe of stakeholders from innovators, through users, product packagers, buyers, funders, to marketeers and commercializers, follows an evolving and emergent pattern of stakeholder relationships, feels, tastes, smells, sounds, looks and desires to be an incident response phenomenon. The analogy to incident response is perhaps crucial to reflect upon since the current innovation process resembles a bureaucratic nightmare in many situations, while incident response “short circuits” any and all bureaucr...

This blog post is a draft response to “Section 1 Science and Technology Excellence / Section 1.2 Progress Beyond the State of the Art / Section 1.2.2 Objectives” in the technical annex of the planned COST 2019 Open Call Proposal Reference: OC-2019-1-23678 "Open European Network for Enterprise Innovation in High Value Manufacturing (ENTOV-HVM)". The image shows an example of a Mandelbrot set to exemplify the fractal nature of living systems that the proposed innovation web approach will leverage as it scales over time (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal ).   The research coordination objectives are focused on the distribution of tasks, sharing of knowledge and know-how, and the creation of synergies among the key roles assumed by Action Participants to achieve the intended outputs. Achieving these objectives turns the proposed Action Participants from initially scattered groups into one transnational team and leverages existing funded research they are...

This blog post is a draft response to “Section 1 Soundness of the Challenge / Section 1.2 Progress Beyond the State of the Art / Section 1.2.1 Approach to the Challenges and Progress beyond the State of the Art” in the technical annex of the planned COST 2019 Open Call Proposal Reference: OC-2019-1-23678 "Open European Network for Enterprise Innovation in High Value Manufacturing (ENTOV-HVM)". The image shows the logo of the effort which consists of overlapping spaces for each archetypal role of the innovation web and a central Lotus flower in tribute to the concept / paradigm of Lotus Innovation put forward by Debra Mae Amidon (see http://entovation.com/lotus-innovation/ ). Compared to current concepts of technology innovation accelerator policies, procedures, process and organizations, ENTOV-HVM is unique and beyond state-of-the art due to its focus on (a) weaving unique and customized innovation webs for each (group of) ideas, (b) populating the most relevant role...

This blog post is a draft response to “Section 1 Soundness of the Challenge / Section 1.1.2 Description of the Challenge (Main Aim)” in the technical annex of the planned COST 2019 Open Call Proposal Reference: OC-2019-1-23678 "Open European Network for Enterprise Innovation in High Value Manufacturing (ENTOV-HVM)". As mentioned in the previous post the state of the art for the transition of ideas from innovators and early career researchers in universities and research institutions represents a fragmented picture which differs significantly not only from region to region, but also in relation to the type of innovations and research efforts involved. From the perspective of the young innovator / researchers and early career investigators a vast number of potential evolution paths exist and it is a formidable challenge to choose the most suitable. Indeed it is like standing at the entry gate of a labyrinth and suspecting that not choosing the most effective path may be ...

This blog post is a draft response to “Section 1 Soundness of the Challenge / Section 1.1.1 Description of the State-of-the-Art” in the technical annex of the planned COST 2019 Open Call Proposal Reference: OC-2019-1-23678 "Open European Network for Enterprise Innovation in High Value Manufacturing (ENTOV-HVM)". The image is drawn from the Wikipedia entry on “Diffusion of innovations” (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations , accessed May 2nd, 2019) as put forward by Everett Rogers in 2003 (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_Rogers , accessed May 3rd, 2019). The blue curve describes the degree that various consumer groups adopt an innovation and the yellow curve describes the market share of the innovation. This is similar to the “Technology adoption life cycle” also discussed by Everett Rogers (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle , accessed May 2nd, 2019). “This proposal seeks support to nurture the collaborat...

Any successful innovation is the result of emergence. An innovation is an idea which is *new* to a specific context and has matured sufficiently to clearly understand its unique contribution. Success is hereby understood that the idea has passed through the innovation and early adopters’ stage to arrive in the adoption stage of the early majority. Emergence is the phenomenon of a living system developing attributes as the results of complex to chaotic interactions of its elements which are fundamentally unpredictable using Aristotelian paradigms. Taking more holistic and living systems perspectives however significantly increases the probability of making emergence predictable. The perspective of relevance taken in this review is that of innovation webs. The image chosen for this blog post is that of DNA “seen from the top” to illustrate the beauty, harmony and complexity of living systems. Innovation webs are a unique network of relationships between specific behavioural roles e...