D1.2 Report on existing Open Innovation and Science2.0 approaches and tools

To master increasingly complex challenges of innovation, such as digitalisation and globalisation, companies have shifted from the so-called closed innovation processes, where internal R&D activities lead to internally developed products distributed by the company itself, towards a more open way of innovating. Open Innovation has been defined as “the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively.”, which means that there are various stakeholders involved in the innovation process and they must engage in new forms of cooperation. Open innovation must go beyond the research and business sector; the civil society (citizens, user crowds, user communities, associations, non-profit organizations) must be integrated in the process to ensure the expansion of knowledge and that this process addresses the right questions and contributes with valuable ideas to find solutions. This is the added value of Open Innovation: Work together to co-create the future and drive structural changes far beyond the scope of what any organization or person could do alone. For this transformation to take place, universities, RTOs, industry and other stakeholders involved in the innovation process need not only to be encouraged to open up and collaborate, but also to be given practical guidance of how to interface effectively in Open Innovation programmes for the benefit of the actors and the society as a whole. At this point, the EU project Science2Society (S2S) has much to say. The project will investigate the mechanisms through which universities, RTOs, society and industry collaborate to create value based on the Open Innovation paradigm. This will involve assessing how ideas, knowledge and people can flow in and out these stakeholders’ environments and outlining success factors, barriers and challenges from the perception of the different stakeholders. In order to make this investigation open and available for all the stakeholders, the results will be compiled in an easily accessible knowledge database of University-Industry-Society (UIS) interface schemes, approaches, tools and experiences or real cases that can be used in an Open Innovation context, working sustainably and consistently in a variety of sectors and national settings. This enables stakeholders from universities, industries, RTOs and society not only to get access to an information source that can be browsed through, but also to answer specific questions and address real problems in the field of Open Innovation. The report at hand and the deliverable D1.1.Report accompanying the knowledge database complement each other and explain how this knowledge has been gathered and how the relations among the different concepts have been established.