Virtual Event: Democratizing Innovation

Fostering collaboration among the public sector, industry, academia and civil society to address the challenges of our time.

Information

Date: 06th -10th July 2020*
Time: Flexible options to contribute 24h/day across the five days | 1,5h live discussions at each day
Where: Online platform accessible via PC and Smartphone (Slack.com) – invitation link will follow
Who: Persons involved in innovation practice and policy
Organizer: EU project RiConfigure | Institute for Advanced Studies and Fondazione Adriano Olivetti
Contact: geyer@ihs.ac.at | please register via E-Mail until June 26th 2020

Context

Quadruple Helix (QH) innovation, the collaboration of actors from public sector, industry, academia and civil society, is a concept to address complex problems and to innovate for the benefits of all involved. By emphasizing collaboration across sectors and the active involvement of civil society, QH links to models such as Open Innovation 2.0 and Mode3.

The EU project RiConfigure has engaged with a number of QH cases across Europe and Colombia and established first-hand knowledge how these work in practice. The current COVID-19 crisis creates new challenges for society while, at the same time, ‘old’ problems, such as the climate crisis, are not disappearing. Most of the ways addressing wicked problems are currently top-down and expert based. We thus aim to foster collaborative- and more democratic modes of innovation.

About the dialogue days

The RiConfigure ‘dialogue days’ are an open online process that brings together policy makers, practitioners and researchers working on and with QH innovation. Knowledge and experience of participants from innovation policy and praxis are linked with findings from an empirical analysis of European and Colombian cases of Quadruple Helix
collaborations. The analyzed cases are innovation projects located in fields such as energy production, climate change adaption, connected mobility and smart labor. Together we will discuss what it needs for these type of innovation projects to thrive – particularly in these challenging times. Special emphasis will be given to learnings from COVID-19 challenges to innovation collaborations, both as impacts on and potential of innovation in corona times.

This virtual event is organized through the online platform ‘Slack’ (www.slack.com) that allows participants to join discussions whenever they are available. There will be a main channel where, along the dialogue days, videos and other input, stemming from the analysis of RiConfigure, will be uploaded. Sub-channels allow specific discussions as well as the co-creation of output e.g., policy briefs or best practice collection. In each channel, a moderator will stimulate
discussions and summarize key learnings. Participants may thus contribute to the whole five-day process, or, join the discussions on selective days/times. The platform will be designed easy-accessible so no specific technical skills are needed to join and contribute.

This initiative follows a first dialogue event realized in Barcelona in May 2019. This second edition was re-designed in an online format in order to allow participation in times of the COVID-19 crisis.

What to expect

• Explore and learn from good practice examples for collaborative innovation
• Discuss tools & methods for involving civil society in innovation
• Connect and develop new ideas of practitioners and policymakers
• Jointly lay ground for a policy brief, an innovation training program and practice-oriented handbooks for collaborative innovation targeted for practitioners and policymakers

About RiConfigure

The EU project RiConfigure (https://riconfigure.eu) implements a series of workshops and interventions in which actors explore different forms of Quadruple Helix collaborations, exchange experiences and help to identify good practices.

Working together across different sectors – research, industry, the public sector, and civil society – has great promise for innovation projects that seek to provide public value. But new forms of collaboration also entail new challenges that we want to help innovation actors identify and overcome. We supplement this with extensive study of roughly 100 quadruple helix cases, cross-cutting analysis of collaboration practice & governance, as well as a series of high-level dialogue events in which innovation practitioners and policy-makers meet to discuss, learn, and influence. The outcomes of the project will be communicated in the form of original analyses, case stories, practical lessons, and recommendations for policy, and will inform our training program for actors involved in innovation.