The way we develop and introduce innovation is changing. While for many years the entrepreneur and the development lab have been recognized as prime locus of innovation, today innovation is seen as something which can happen anywhere by anyone at anytime. Emerging innovation models such as open innovation, user innovation or community innovation illustrate this development stressing that innovation is increasingly perceived as an open, distributed and networked phenomenon. A recently finished European project has investigated trends and pathways for how we will innovate in the future.
While new forms of innovation have been discussed intensively in recent years, there is little systematic exploration about their potential for different sectors and areas and its implications for economy, society, and policy. The Innovation Futures Project (INFU) addresses questions such as whether the increasing involvement of different actors such as customers, citizens, research institutes and public organizations will hold on in the future. The team also is concerned whether the pace of innovation in a global innovation landscape can be maintained in the long run and how this affects people, communities, employees and companies?
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The INFU project is a foresight project employing various methods such as scanning weak signals, organizing expert panels, conducting interviews, and building and visualizing scenarios in order to construct plausible, relevant long-term scenarios of future innovation landscapes. The project was funded within the 7. Framework Programme of the European Commission and involved more than 150 experts from academia, industry and policy over a period of 2.5 years.
Based on an analysis of various sources including academic literature, Internet, blogs, newspapers, and magazines, 68 ‘signals’ pointing towards emerging innovation patterns were identified in the first phase of the project. These signals are practical examples from different sectors and fields worldwide describing how innovation is organized in very different and novel ways. Based on this collection of cases a number of innovation visions were developed and discussed which describe how innovation may be organized in a new way in very different fields in the future.
The study expects that the trend towards a further opening of the innovation process will continue and become even stronger in the coming years. Innovation models and examples identified, such as the organization of innovation contests, crowdsourcing projects, innovation camps, open source software development, online voting to the approval of new products and other forms of user involvement all provide evidence for this development. This development is not just driven by companies, which for instance, organize innovation contests or crowdsourcing projects. Flexible working patterns, outsourcing and the increasing number of professional freelancers, foster and enable the emergence of new organizational innovation strategies. The further individualization of society is a driver for this development, which, as one effect among others, increases peoples´ ambitions to express themselves.
However, the research team expects also some limitations of a further participation of many different actors in the innovation process which may reach a tipping point in the long run. Many requests for time-consuming participation, negotiation and debating in innovation processes may result in a participation fatigue, which makes it increasingly difficult to involve people on the long run.
The research reveals that the motivation of organizations and individuals to develop innovation is changing as well. Intrinsically motivated users, communities, citizens, and social entrepreneurs are adding their motivations to company innovation activity, complementing the typical driver of profit motive. The growing awareness of climate change, social tensions, and the inefficient use of resources are driving forces for changes in innovation patterns which requires the development of new business models.
Another important trend is the continuous use of technology which enables new ways to organize the innovation process: from idea creation to the launch of new products and services on the market. From a technological perspective, especially new Web 2.0 applications and software algorithms are bringing about changes in innovation patterns, as they make sharing of knowledge and collaboration easier and more affordable on a global scale. Within this context, with “automatized innovation”, the INFU team, for instance, envisaged that a number of new techniques, such as the semantic web analysis allows for automatizing parts of the innovation process. In this model, sophisticated semantic web-filters track changes in consumer preferences and new ideas in real time, and automatically extract the innovations with outstanding market potential.
Even though we can expect a further acceleration of the innovation processes, there is also some evidence that organizations or individuals intentionally chose strategies to escape from the race towards ongoing innovation. Although we may typically observe more of the same incremental innovation everywhere, there are but a few radical innovations across many industries. The concept of innovation seems to lose its a character in serving as a competitive weapon for some companies in some industries.
For more information, reports and videos see www.innovation-futures.org or contact Karl-Heinz Leitner at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
