European Knowledge Alliance for “Accelerating the Diffusion of Innovation in High Value Manufacturing” (ADI-HVM) - Aims and Priorities (Draft)

European Knowledge Alliance for “Accelerating the Diffusion of Innovation in High Value Manufacturing” (ADI-HVM)

Dear all - as the workpackages, scheduel and resourcing hardens (updated plans next week I hope) we need to connect tightly to the actual programme intent. This draft is a first attempt and your feedback is welcome. Note especially that moving to the forefront are the intent to formalize the effort as a learning community and the introduction of a relevant vocational and higher educational career framework to enable sustainable impact.

Aims and Priorities

ADI-HVM aims at strengthening Europe's innovation capacity and at fostering innovation in higher education, business and the broader socio-economic environment of the European Union by identifying, developing, and sustainably implementing measures to disruptively accelerate the value creation of ideas in high value manufacturing from inception to late adopters and laggards in markets at individual, organizational and systemic levels. The key deliverables are:

1. an open, adaptive and inclusive community of applied learning formalised as an association of participants from a highly diverse spectrum of higher education, business, and individuals,
2. a living systems based system dynamics simulator, forecaster and monitor of the end-to-end innovation journey and its value creation based on principles of intellectual capital reporting,
3. a coherent set of actionable treatments and interventions for accelerating the speed of value creation,
4. policy recommendations at individual, organizational and systemic levels in partner regions and the overarching European Union, and
5. a novel vocational and academic career framework focused on the “weaving” and “acceleration” of rapid innovation systems in high value manufacturing.

ADI-HVM is designed as a response to the results of a needs analysis which re-evaluated the results of multiple relevant prior research studies the project participants, conducted a literature review regarding the application of diffusion of innovation research methods to the high value manufacturing context and performed a series of semi-structured interviews with relevant representatives of high value manufacturing companies in various regions and at varying levels of maturity and size. The primary outcome of the needs analysis was the importance of focusing on the “speed of value creation” through innovation from end-to-end across all technical readiness levels and market diffusion stages while current innovation approaches in high value manufacturing at all levels are focused on “technical readiness of products”, innovators and early adopters in the market and internally focused business cases.

This gap leads to a significant amount of ideas with a high potential for value creation not penetrating to that point in the market where the greatest value creation is enabled. This then results in not only the loss of significant resource investments but also to the loss of significant value creation at all levels. The primary remediation of this gap has been determined as disruptively accelerating the speed of innovation diffusion across technical readiness levels and the diffusion of innovation curve. In order to remediate this gap the project team has concluded that a deeper understanding of this end-to-end journey is required and this can best be achieved by applying living systems principles. The project team has additionally concluded that it is also necessary to achieve a deeper understanding of how ideas can be designed to travel through such systems more rapidly. The relationship between the diffusion of innovation systems and ideas is hereby considered to be symbiotic and heavily influenced not only by technological game changers such as related to Industry 4.0, but just as importantly by the pattern of collaboration between individual human actors participating in this journey.

ADI-HVM considers itself the “seed” of the aspired community and seeks to not only itself evolve but also to achieve sustainable future-proof growth by continuously re-creating itself virally in the cultural, educational, business and geographic domains of its members.

Deliverable Overview

ADI-HVM creates of an open, adaptive and inclusive community of applied learning across higher education, business and the broader socio-economic environment which acknowledges the end-to-end nature of innovation and symbiotic relationship of ideas and the innovation systems they exist within. Acknowledging that the complex adaptive and digital nature of this relationship has dis-evolved from traditional analog industrial ways-of-working, ADI-HVM works to embed this paradigm into practice and policy making at all levels. ADI-HVM works primarily with a highly diverse group of early career researchers and practitioners in European countries with low levels of research intensity and industry connectedness in the high value manufacturing space.

The community will revolve around an interactive and easy to use living systems based system dynamics simulation of the end-to-end innovation journey which reflects a broad range of relevant scientific and social sciences and arts disciplines. The simulation will be designed to appeal to late adopters in higher education and business for robustly forecasting the probability of end-to-end success of an innovation, identifying key risk threats and opportunities for improving this probability, and for selecting the most viable pragmatic interventions that accelerate the evolution of an idea in order to mitigate risk threats and achieve risk opportunities more rapidly. The simulation will consist of a digital solution offered as a service, a physical board game and a stage play in order to address different learning styles. The simulation will be provided free of charge and without copyright restrictions. The simulation will furthermore be embedded in a series of learning offerings ranging from self-paced e-learnings through training certificates provided by Chambers of Commerce to master level certificate courses offered by participating institutes of higher education. Finally the simulation will also enable the design, impact assessment and optimization of public policies related to the systems of innovation themselves.

As an integral part of its activities ADI-HVM will focus on contributing to the modernization of Europe's higher education systems not only through a novel vocational and academic career framework in the “weaving” of rapid innovation systems for high value manufacturing, but also through continuous recommendations for policy making at individual, organizational and systemic levels in partner regions and the overarching EU.

Participants in ADI-HVM are drawn from a wide range of disciplines connected by an interest in advancing the innovation speed in high value manufacturing. Typical challenges described by participants during the initial needs analysis include:

1.       How can an industrial company rapidly diffuse innovations throughout all of its internal and / or extended supply chain?

2.       How can an industrial company design its products and / or services to rapidly diffuse to late adopters in its target market?

3.       How can the diffusion of innovations from ideation to market saturation be effectively tracked and accelerated?

4.       Do archetypal end-to-end patterns of innovation diffusion exist, can they be made transparent and manageable for higher education institutions and enterprises of varying size.

5.       Do differences in innovation systems exist in respect to culture, region, product domains and business models?

 

The community building efforts will require a significant amount of mobility by project participants. The costs for this mobility will be carried partially by the project and supported by other funding instruments such as parallel funding requests submitted to the COST programme in September 2019. 

Key features of ADI-HVM

The key features of ADI-HVM are:

• Innovation of the innovation approach in higher education and business through focus on the speed of the end-to-end value creation from ideation to late adopters and laggards.
• A robust partnership of stakeholders from enterprises and higher education grown through co-creation of previous proposals and co-evolution of project focus.
• Willingness of stakeholders to enable an impact going beyond the project lifetime by enabling formalization of a sustainable association supporting implementation of the career frameworks.

If you are interested in learning more please visit us at www.innovation-web.eu, our LinkedIn Group at https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8779542/, our blog at https://www.innovation-web.eu/entov-hvm-blog, our Researchgate project page at https://www.researchgate.net/project/Open-European-Network-for-Enterprise-Innovation-in-High-Value-Manufacturing-ENTOV-HVM and our Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2014779865300180/. You can also follow us via Twitter: @owschwabe (#innovationweb) and the LinkedIn Group page https://www.linkedin.com/company/entov.