Current projects

Industrial innovation practices have changed fundamentally over the last ten years. Companies increasingly engage in open innovation and global knowledge networks and ecosystems expand. Thus industrial innovation requires more than ever the orchestration of networks and systems, besides the management of company-internal processes. Social media and crowd sourcing provide new tools creating big data, but many companies struggle with making appropriate use of them. While these and other new practices can improve the innovation capabilities of companies, they may also bring new challenges to traditional innovation policy instruments.

The project will examine companies’ current use of new innovation practices around Europe and good practice experience of their use. The study will cover key industrial sectors in 11 EU Member States, with a qualitative survey aiming to achieve a response from some 800 companies, feeding into an open database. Insights on current innovation practices of companies will then be used to draw implications for innovation policy. Results will be discussed with industry and policy actors. The project will produce a toolbox to be used in other countries that wish to conduct comparative studies.

The project is coordinated by Erkki Ormala, Department of Management Studies, Aalto University, Finland. Partners are Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, UK, Joanneum Research, Austria, and Zabala Consulting, Spain. International organizations such as the OECD and the European Roundtable of Industrialists, industrial associations and government agencies are actively participating in the study and in the wide dissemination of its results throughout Europe.

UT team: Kornelia Konrad, Klaasjan Visscher, Stefan Kuhlmann, Erik Arnold

Contact: Kornelia Konrad