Summer Update – Now earning a warm meal a day and suffering from indigestion!

 

Hi everyone – greetings from the Open European Network for Enterprise Innovation team and perhaps a long-awaited update on where we have been, are and are going. We have admittedly been rather quiet over the past months – not for lack of having anything to share as you will see, but more from finally getting traction in a number of projects, commercializing enough to buy us a warm meal a day and realizing that we need to have small meals to prevent indigestion with ensuing frustration.

So, what have been up to? Below a summary of ongoing activities and as ever, if you are interested in getting more engaged do reach out – enough exciting activities to join!

Besides the below there is a wide spectrum of funding proposals we are working on. Horizon Europe and the Eureka program are offering many great opportunities, and our emerging commercial model of “appreciation” fees plus work-package reservation and success “commission” is being warmly received. With a bit of luck we will also be able to issue the next version of the Litmus Test (see https://innovation-web.eu/litmus-test) which is proving wildly successful in exploring/shaping ventures successfully.

Research

• Supporting an Irish PhD thesis exploring co-creation of value in Industry 4.0. The initial expectation was to see a certain balance of co-creation efforts among ecosystem members, but now clearly seeing that there is usually only one person really doing the heavy lifting – sound familiar? Maybe time to challenge the value of collaboration and highlight the value of encouraging the true-blood entrepreneurs who actually turn the dial inside, outside and among different types of organizations.
• Supporting a Portugese Masters thesis exploring the diffusion of Green Hydrogen solutions into the alternative energy market. The Litmus Test tool is being applied intensively and as usual we are seeing archetypal patterns of collaboration success emerging. A great further proof-of-concept for the power of our innovation diffusion work. Looking at the great insights being generated we may well encourage developing this into an EU funding proposal as part of meeting climate change goals.
• In collaboration with a Portugese university working on a multi-year research proposal on the interdependency of the UN Sustainability Goals in relation to national/territorial/city public expenditure cost (i.e., in green/blue bond issues).

Start-Up Support

• Working with an Israeli circular textile company to introduce an innovation textile recycling microfactory solution on franchise basis across EU cities. Our innovation diffusion research is helping to shape the venture and identify relevant funding opportunities at EU/national/territorial/city levels.
• Collaborating with an Israeli manufacturer of innovative self-sanitizing textiles to help create and implement an EU market introduction effort. Of course, our innovation diffusion research is proving very helpful and in addition it is fascinating to explore how ecosystems change in flavour as a product matures.

Community Building

• Now intensively accelerating the growth of a cyber safety community of city/regional CIOs and CISOs with the support of ENISA (see https://www.majorcities.eu/isac-for-cities-plus/).

Our key learning point over the past months has been that, once again, we have kissed too many frogs that did not turn into princes or princesses – trying hard to avoid by focusing on referrals of customers now. Also interesting is that emergence underlies all of the successes (and failures) – so the old adage remains that of 10 investments only 1 will recoup all, 2-3 will break-even and the rest will fail – “success” remains the exception here as everywhere, so don´t give up on any of your ventures – patience and being open to new things is the key.

Cheers and have a great summer – we will do our best to return to sharing more often

Oliver and the Team

Image courtesy of https://www.dreamstime.com/illustration/warm-meal.html

P.S. 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, our Sourceforge page at https://sourceforge.net/projects/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.