Why Information Matters: A Foundation for Resilience

Embracing Change: The Critical Role of Information, a research project by the Internews' Center for Innovation & Learning, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, combines Internews' longstanding effort to highlight the important role ofinformation with Rockefeller's groundbreaking work on resilience. The project focuses on three major aspects:- Building knowledge around the role of information in empowering communities to understand and adapt to different types of change: slow onset, long-term, and rapid onset / disruptive;- Identifying strategies and techniques for strengthening information ecosystems to support behavioral adaptation to disruptive change; and- Disseminating knowledge and principles to individuals, communities, the private sector, policymakers, and other partners so that they can incorporate healthy information ecosystems as a core element of their social resilience strategies

Eco‐Holonic 4.0 Circular Business Model to Conceptualize Sustainable Value Chain Towards Digital Transition

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a circular business model based on an Eco-Holonic Architecture, through the integration of circular economy and holonic principles. A conceptual model is developed to manage the complexity of integrating circular economy principles, digital transformation, and tools and frameworks for sustainability into business models. The proposed architecture is multilevel and multiscale in order to achieve the instantiation of the sustainable value chain in any territory. The architecture promotes the incorporation of circular economy and holonic principles into new circular business models. This integrated perspective of business model can support the design and upgrade of the manufacturing companies in their respective industrial sectors. The conceptual model proposed is based on activity theory that considers the interactions between technical and social systems and allows the mitigation of the metabolic rift that exists between natural and social metabolism. This study contributes to the existing literature on circular economy, circular business models and activity theory by considering holonic paradigm concerns, which have not been explored yet. This research also offers a unique holonic architecture of circular business model by considering different levels, relationships, dynamism and contextualization (territory) aspects

New horizons shaping science, technology and innovation diplomacy: the case of Latin America and the Caribbean and the European Union. EL-CSID Working Paper Issue 2018/20 • August 2018

Europe and the world face a moment of transformation. The global financial crisis wiped out years of economic and social progress, exposed structural weaknesses in world economies and emphasised the importance of the real economies and strong industries. Modernisation and digitalisation of the industrial base together with the promotion of a competitive framework for industry through research, technology and innovation are drivers for recovery. Innovation, and particularly open innovation, is a key factor of global competitiveness. The European Commission (EC) addresses international cooperation policy in a wider framework and adapts to the evolving needs of partner countries at different stages of development (EC, 2018a). Latin America and the Caribbean countries’ (LAC) and the European Union’s (EU) cooperation on science, technology and innovation has a long history based on cultural roots and common concerns. They share a strategic bi-regional partnership, which was launched in 1999 and stepped up significantly in recent years. The two regions co-operate closely at international level across a broad range of issues and maintain an intensive political dialogue at all levels. EU-LAC relationships are moving from a traditional cooperation model towards a learning model, where sharing experiences and learning from innovations appear to be decisive (OECD, 2014). This paper focuses on the challenges that innovation nowadays poses to international relations and diplomacy. It is based on the evidence gained by the research team from participation in several EULAC projects, especially the ELAN Network project coordinated by TECNALIA, the INNOVACT project as well as other projects and activities

Ecosystem Intelligence for AI-based Assistant Platforms

Digital assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri have seen a large adoption over the past years. Using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, they provide a vocal interface to physical devices as well as to digital services and have spurred an entire new eco-system. This comprises the big tech companies themselves, but also a strongly growing community of developers that make these functionalities available via digital platforms. At present, only few research is available to understand the structure and the value creation logic of these AI-based assistant platforms and their ecosystem. This research adopts ecosystem intelligence to shed light on their structure and dynamics. It combines existing data collection methods with an automated approach that proves useful in deriving a network-based conceptual model of Amazon's Alexa assistant platform and ecosystem. It shows that skills are a key unit of modularity in this ecosystem, which is linked to other elements such as service, data, and money flows. It also suggests that the topology of the Alexa ecosystem may be described using the criteria reflexivity, symmetry, variance, strength, and centrality of the skill coactivations. Finally, it identifies three ways to create and capture value on AI-based assistant platforms. Surprisingly only a few skills use a transactional business model by selling services and goods but many skills are complementary and provide information, configuration, and control services for other skill provider products and services. These findings provide new insights into the highly relevant ecosystems of AI-based assistant platforms, which might serve enterprises in developing their strategies in these ecosystems. They might also pave the way to a faster, data-driven approach for ecosystem intelligence

Complex regional innovation networks and HEI engagement the case of Chicago

This article considers how HEIs engage within local complex development networks in order to develop the urban metropolis, using the case of Chicago as a specific example. It focuses on three main issues: how collaboration occurs amongst regional stakeholders; how goals are set and how shared goals have been created; and the extent to which there exist conflicting views amongst stakeholders, and their capability to create solutions where there are disagreements and clashing purposes. Chicago is in the middle of making a paradigm shift, with at its core an open system approach that includes a variety of ways to engage citizen-users as co-creators, including through user-driven innovation and digitalised services. In the metropolitan area there is a widely shared goal amongst stakeholders to develop and improve novel approaches for regional engagement to enhance innovativeness and competitiveness. The paradigm shift in regional engagement from building co-operation clusters to one of organisational betweenness and open systemic thinking requires new skills in management and leadership centred on interaction, co-creation and sharing of knowledge

Technology Management: Corporate-Startup Co-Location and How to Measure the Effects

Rapid technological developments make firms favor the creation of new approaches to technology management. Startups can offer large firms access to new technologies and the emphasis on corporate-startup collaboration has therefore reached a new level. Many models exist and co-location is one of these. While co-location in the context of clusters and innovation systems has been studied in previous literature, research on corporate-startup co-location is very limited. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the broader phenomenon of business co-location and based on this review, suggest a framework and metrics to evaluate the effects of corporate-startup co-location. The paper originates from earlier conducted studies on corporate-startup collaboration models. For this paper a literature review on the broader phenomenon of business co-location is conducted. The theoretical contribution is a proposed multi-stakeholder framework and metrics for evaluating the effects of corporate-startup co-location

Systems of innovation and innovation ecosystems: a literature review in search of complementarities

This paper aims to clarify to what extent the emerging theory of innovation ecosystems (IE) and the theory of systems of innovation (SI) are complementary and then identify how its communities could benefit from cross-fertilization. We performed a critical literature review of both topics using meta-synthesis as method to identify, analyze and compare the two theories. Using a framework, this paper explores the elements belonging to each theory’s domain, in order to identify the key factors necessary to compare the two theories. The results of this analysis show that both theories involve the assessment of three key aspects: the understanding of innovation activities, the role of the agents involved, and the interaction and resulting networks among them. A similarity was found showing that these two different theories are applications of System Thinking approach. Another finding, which has not been mentioned in previous research on the topic, is that the construction of the initial concepts of the IE theory was originally rooted in several SI elements. Finally, we found key factors that may be the cross-fertilization link between the two communities that represent each theory

Human Interaction in Learning Ecosystems based on Open Source Solutions

Technological ecosystems are software solutions based on the integration of heterogeneous software components through information flows in order to provide a set of services that each component separately does not offer, as well as to improve the user experience. In particular, the learning ecosystems are technological ecosystems focused on learning and knowledge management in different contexts such as educational institutions or companies. The ecosystem metaphor comes from biology field and it has transferred to technology field to highlight the evolving component of software. Taking into account the definitions of natural ecosystems, a technological ecosystem is a set of people and software components that play the role of organisms; a series of elements that allow the ecosystem works (hardware, networks, etc.); and a set of information flows that establish the relationships between the software components, and between these and the people involved in the ecosystem. Human factor has a main role in the definition and development of this kind of solutions. In previous works, a metamodel has been defined and validated to support Model-Driven Development of learning ecosystems based on Open Source software, but the interaction in the learning ecosystem should be defined in order to complete the proposal to improve the development process of technological ecosystems. This paper presents the definition and modelling of the human interaction in learning ecosystem

Managing stimulation of regional innovation subjects’ interaction in the digital economy

The reported study was funded by RFBR according to the research project No. 18-01000204_a, No. 16-07-00031_a, No. 18-07-00975_a.Purpose: The article is devoted to solving fundamental scientific problems in the scope of the development of forecasting modeling methods and evaluation of regional company’s innovative development parameters, synthesizing new methods of big data processing and intelligent analysis, as well as methods of knowledge eliciting and forecasting the dynamics of regional innovation developments through benchmarking. Design/Methodology/Approach: For regional economic development, it is required to identify the mechanisms that contribute to (or impede) the innovative economic development of the regions. The synergetic approach to management is based on the fact that there are multiple paths of IS development (scenarios with different probabilities), although it is necessary to reach the required attractor by meeting the management goals. Findings: The present research is focused on obtainment of new knowledge in creating a technique of multi-agent search, collection and processing of data on company’s innovative development indicators, models and methods of intelligent analysis of the collected data. Practical Implications: The author developed recommendations before starting the process of institutional changes in a specific regional innovation system. The article formulates recommendations on the implementation of institutional changes in the region taking into account the sociocultural characteristics of the region’s population. Originality/Value: It is the first time, when a complex of models and methods is based on the use of a convergent model of large data volumes processing is presented.peer-reviewe