Workshop 1:
Innovation, Technology Foresight and Regional Development
Thursday 8 June at 15.00-17.00
Chair: Toni Ahlqvist
Innovating in Nordic Style: Technological Prospects in the Nordic ICT Foresight Project
Toni Ahlqvist (VTT Innovation Studies, Finland)
Is there a special Nordic style of innovation in ICT’s? Nordic countries have shown remarkable results in developing information and communication technologies and applying them in the societal contexts and economic activities. The Nordic style is inevitably linked to the organization of national and regional innovation systems. Until the start of the 21st century, the Nordic style has functioned quite well, but in the rapidly changing global economic landscape nothing is constant and nothing is steadily in equilibrium. That is why also the Nordic style should be more future oriented, more based on strategic futures intelligence and foresight.
The Nordic ICT foresight project aims to contribute to the strategic intelligence of the Nordic countries. It provides visions and scenarios concerning the societal applications of ICT’s in four Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden). The project creates scenarios illustrating the possible futures of ICT’s in axes of generic technologies, applications, and markets. It will also produce comparative knowledge on the national differences in the Nordic style of innovation. Nordic ICT Foresight has four focus areas: health care, experience economy (media and communication), production economy (industrial automation, production systems), and information security. The presentation discusses the preliminary results of the project and makes reflections on their importance and meaning to the futures of Nordic style, and to the practices of technology and regional foresight.
Innovating for the Future. About the Use of Futures Research in Innovation processes
Patrick A. van der Duin (Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands)
In this paper I investigate how commercial organisations look to the future and how they use information and knowledge about future developments in their innovation processes. Given the scarcity of resources, organisations have to make decisions with regard to innovations. An important criterion is the way future developments influence the course of the innovation process. The link between futures research and innovation can be established by the lead time of the innovation process, and the uncertainties in the innovation process. Futures research can prevent an organisation from investing time, money and other resources in existing ideas that may not be successful in the future. At various stages of the innovation process organisations collect information and knowledge about what an innovation will eventually look like or, even more important, how it will be used when it is finally introduced into the market. Based on that information, the innovation process is adjusted or even terminated. Alternatively, an idea (for an innovation) may also benefit from new developments that occur while it is being developed. Innovation processes are inherently uncertain and it is very difficult to know in advance how an idea will evolve in the future and which developments it will encounter. This paper will specifically report about two case studies on how Dutch SMEs use futures research in their innovation process. For these case studies, several representants of SMEs, futures researchers and government officials have been interviewed, several documents have been analysed, and workshops have been attended.
North European Bio-Locations: Varying Paths to Success
Ilari Karppi, Anu Takala (Department of Regional Studies, University of Tampere, Finland)
Biotechnology, biomedicine and bioinformatics constitute thriving businesses with virtually unlimited fields of application global. While scientifically based knowledge of nature is essentially dependent of laws of nature, various institutional and emergent features embed the scientific solutions into national regulations and local platforms of specialisation. In this paper we argue that the combination of scientific, regulatory and locally specific factors all contribute to the way of how patterns of success in the highly competitive bio-sectors can be found. We study three non-capital city cases in the Baltic Sea Region: Malmö (Sweden), Tampere (Finland) and Tartu (Estonia) and the respective bio-sector solutions found in each of them. The methods that are used are expert interviews and the review of local policy-documents and strategies; national formal control; and branch-specific ethical norms.
Regional Futures for International Technologies? Case BioTurku
Maria Höyssä (Finland Futures Research Centre, Turku School of Economics, Finland)
How does the localized dimension matter for innovation in fields whose supply networks and markets are international—such as in biotechnology, and other health-related technologies? This paper departs from approaches that focus on regional clusters on a macro level. Instead, the research perspective is borrowed from Science and Technology studies, and focuses attention on innovation processes as they unfold in changing networks. In this paper, these approaches are used to analyze the localized aspects of certain innovation processes that have taken place partially in Turku, Finland. These include a development of a clinical diagnostic service, some drug development R&D lines, and the conceptualization and construction of a local biotechnology science park. The findings indicate that the inventive core of innovation processes is very informal and out of reach of other regional policies than direct funding for joint projects. But, there’s also another level to innovation even at the micro-level, which is the self-organizing networking to utilize or even re-shape the institutional environment.
On the basis of the findings two points emerge for discussion. First, future policies with regional growth aims might do well by focusing on enabling flexible formation of arenas in which bottom-up and top-down developments could be made simultaneously explicit, and linked. Second, were such arenas established, the participatory methods of Futures Studies could be one way to manage dialogue between representatives of bottom-up and top-down networks. It remains open who should decide for the time, the locus, the participants, and the resources for such arenas, and how.