H2020 project on ‘Industrial Innovation in Transition’ granted
STePS has recently been granted an EU Horizon 2020 project on ‘Industrial Innovation in Transition’. 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 also bring new challenges to the traditional innovation policy instruments. The project will study changing innovation practices in 11 EU Member States, with a 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.
The STePS team receives 450.000 Euros for this research, with the total budget of the project being 2.4 million Euros. The project is coordinated by Aalto University, Finland, with partners in Austria, UK, and 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.
