Abstract
The main aim of this paper is to present a concept of enhancement Open Innovation in Central Europe, through designing a dedicated Synergic Crowd Innovation Platform (SCIP) supporting the services and methods of cooperation. The paper presents basic terms related to Open Innovation and discusses current trends and phenomena such as crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, social product development, microworking and living labs. Their implementation to the SCIP will allow to build an effective cooperation environment, with particular emphasis on the area of Advanced Manufacturing.
Keywords
1 Introduction
According to the research performed by Chesbrough, it can be stated that the innovation process is currently facing a “paradigm shift” – the way how companies innovate new ideas and bring them to market is undergoing a fundamental change [1]. Analysis of current trends shows that increasing number of companies is implementing elements of Open Innovation (OI) into their activities [2]. Industry is gaining benefits from using i.a. crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, microworking, Living Labs and makeathons. The usage of those new phenomena, tools and methods in industrial companies is necessary if they want to keep up with worldwide competition. Business models based on Open Innovation paradigm are still under development and therefore there is a need to continue research towards building a dedicated environment, where companies could fully benefit from the new approaches. This task requires also standardization, which is crucial in order to ensure transferability among different industrial organizations and regions. In Central Europe, where advanced manufacturing is a strong branch of economy, it is especially important to support industrial companies with providing the “innovation-friendly ecosystem” equipped with Open Innovation solutions. This is a challenge particularly for scientific organizations, which should deliver state-of-the-art models and transfer technology and knowledge to industrial companies. Therefore, the main aim of this paper is to present a concept of enhancement Open Innovation in Central Europe, through designing a dedicated platform and following services.
In the first sections of the article the issue of open innovations has been defined and current initiatives related to this topic. Further sections describes the project as a step towards the Quadruple Helix Innovation Model.
2 Defining Open Innovation
Literature analysis shows that there are a number of definitions related to Open Innovation. The most common is the one introduced by H. Chesbrough. According to this definition, Open Innovation (OI) “is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively” [1]. When analysing Open Innovation in the context of Advanced Manufacturing it can be noticed that it will be influenced and will influence on both advanced technologies and manufacturing processes. Bearing in mind these dependences, Authors propose the framework for Open Innovation in Advanced Manufacturing illustrated in Fig. 1.
From a technological point of view the Open Innovation paradigm in Advanced Manufacturing cannot spread efficiently without a substantive support of ICT-based solutions which are the pillars of Industry 4.0. Internet of Things and Services (IoTS), Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR & AR), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Human-Machine Interface (HMI), Big data and Cloud computing (CC), etc. enable the Open Innovation paradigm to develop and influence innovation processes among industrial entities. From a manufacturing point of view especially interesting is the impact of OI on the New Product Development Process (NPDP). Changes which can be observed in recent years indicate that traditional approach to product development in increasing number of companies is being replaced or enhanced by Social Product Development.
Together with implementation of Additive Manufacturing, these trends cause a tremendous shift in manufacturing companies and cause a need to develop new and efficient business models. As presented in Fig. 1, to efficiently build an Open Innovation ecosystem, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding should be considered and implemented.
2.1 Crowdsourcing
According to Brabham the term “crowdsourcing” was introduced by Jeff Howe in a paper “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” in 2006. “Howe illustrated the phenomenon of crowdsourcing with a number of cases. Four of these cases—Threadless.com, InnoCentive.com, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and iStockphoto.com—have become early exemplars of the crowdsourcing model in research on the topic” [3]. According to Brabham crowdsourcing can be defined “as an online, distributed problem-solving and production model that leverages the collective intelligence of online communities to serve specific organizational goals” [3]. The most common classification of crowdsourcing, proposed by Howe, includes four categories – (1) crowd wisdom or collective intelligence, in which crowd shares their knowledge, (2) crowd creation, which can be observed when a company turns to customers to create or co-create a product or a service, (3) crowd voting, which possesses information on the basis of crowd’s judgements, and (4) crowdfunding [4].
2.2 Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding, another pillar of Open Innovation, can be defined as “the process of taking a project or business, in need of investment, and asking a large group of people, which is usually the public, to supply this investment” [5]. Currently four main types of crowdfunding can be distinguished (see Table 1).
An analysis of crowdfunding phenomenon is very important from scientific point of view due to a number of reasons. First of all, in recent years, crowdfunding has influenced significantly a process of new product development (NPD). Through presenting the product idea to the public, the crowdfunding has created an opportunity for engineers and designers, to receive an immediate market feedback. It can be quickly and with little effort an investment verified if potential customers are interested in the new product. What is more, the new product is easily linked to potential investors. As it has been underlined by Forbes and Schaefer “a crowdfunding campaign can be launched with minimal cost, no proof of sales and, in three of the models, no release of equity” [5]. Thus, the crowdfunding revolutionizes traditional approach to the process of new product development.
2.3 Social Product Development
In their paper Forbes and Schaefer discuss number of definitions describing Social Product Development and select one of them as the most suitable [6]. Accordingly, the SPD can be explained as “the use of social computing technologies, tools, media, influencing the product lifecycle at any stage through the use of a defined and qualified crowd” [7]. In this paper Authors decided to follow this definition as it is appropriate in the context of Advanced Manufacturing.
2.4 Microworking
Microworking (known also as crowdworking) has been defined as the individual behaviors associated with microtask crowdsourcing work [8]. It’s a new form of working beyond organizational boundaries, created mostly by social media technologies, in which engagement in work is posted by organizations or individuals on a web-based, third-party platform in exchange for monetary remuneration [9]. Workers are only hired for one particular task, even if that task takes only seconds or minutes. The idea of breaking down tasks to their lowest common denominator is nothing new itself. In fact, it is paradigmatic Taylorism from the beginning of 20th Century. The new is automatic management of workers through computer code and mostly engagement of the part-time and temporary labor. Computer code may perform a variety of supervisory tasks: assigning tasks to workers, speeding up work processes, determining the timing and length of breaks, monitoring quality, ranking employee, and more [10].
The main advantage of microworking is the fact that workers have huge flexibility to set their own working schedules. On the other hand, the huge disadvantage is the fact that workers don’t receive the employee status. Moreover, there is a risk of cancellation of a task while a worker is in the midst of completion [10].
2.5 Living Labs
Direct form of Open Innovation enhancement represents Living Labs (LLs), which can be defined as “as user-centered, open innovation ecosystems based on systematic user co-creation approach, integrating research and innovation processes in real life communities and settings” [11]. “European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) is the international federation of benchmarked Living Labs in Europe and worldwide. Founded in November 2006 under the auspices of the Finnish European Presidency, the network has grown in ‘waves’ up to this day” [11].
3 Open Innovation 2.0
Literature analysis shows that currently Open Innovation paradigm can be divided into two “phases” – Open Innovation 1.0 (OI 1.0) and 2.0 (OI 2.0). The criteria that distinct OI 1.0 from OI 2.0 include: integration of external knowledge in own innovation process (outside-in perspective), co-creation of knowledge (co-creation perspective) and externalization of internal knowledge (inside-out perspective). When analyzing the OI from these three criteria point of view, it can be stated that OI 1.0 should be linked to (1) licensing-in and spin-in (in terms of outside-in perspective), (2) consortia, joint-venture (e.g. R&D), industrial clusters (in terms of co-creation perspective), (3) licensing-out and spin-out (in terms of inside-out perspective), whereas OI 2.0 should be allied to (1) crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and lead user method (in terms of outside-in perspective), (2) innovating with communities like Living Labs, Fab-Labs (in terms of co-creation perspective), (3) online platforms and innovation challenges and competitions (in terms of inside-out perspective) [12]. When analyzing existing online platforms related to Open Innovation and matching them with appropriate phenomena, tools and methods crucial from Advanced Manufacturing point of view it can be noticed that a number of platforms are focused on crowdsourcing (e.g. ninesigma.com, innocentive.com, threadless.com) and crowdfunding (e.g. kickstarter.com, indiegogo.com, www.ulule.com, crowdcube.com, experiment.com), whereas less popular are platforms dedicated to Social Product Development (e.g. quirky.com), microworking (e.g. mturk.com, microtask.com, crowdsource.com) and Living Labs (enoll.org).
Each of the platform is dedicated to another goal. None of them offers full set of tools and processes to effectively support Advanced Manufacturing and especially NPDP. Therefore, within the SYNERGY project, the Authors decided to develop a platform which would fill in this gap.
4 SYNERGY Project as a Step Towards the Quadruple Helix Innovation Model
Project “SYnergic Networking for innovativeness Enhancement of central european actoRs focused on hiGh-tech industrY” (acronym SYNERGY) is financed within Interreg Central Europe programme. One of the programme’s priority is Cooperating on innovation to make Central Europe more competitive with its specific objective to improve sustainable linkages among actors of the innovation systems for strengthening regional innovation capacity in Central Europe.
4.1 SYNERGY Aims and Methodology
As McAdam and Debackere underline, in recent years, the effectiveness of the Triple Helix Innovation Model - linking government, universities, and industry - has been questioned, due to the reason that “regions have failed to meet expected levels of innovation, GDP development, and employment” [13]. To improve regional innovating ecosystems, another helix has been included in the model – the ‘media-based and culture-based public’ and ‘civil society’ [14]. The Quadruple Helix Innovation Model has been established by involving societal-based innovation users.
Following the Quadruple Helix Innovation Model, the SYNERGY project partners represent not only entities based on Triple Helix Innovation Model – four higher education and research institutions (Poland, Slovenia and Germany), one SME (Austria), two business support organizations (Croatia, Italy) and government as an associated partner (Poland), but also the project aims at involving society.
To overcome common challenges including: administrative barriers for innovation, low global innovation performance and technology transfer, low New Member States participation in Research and Development, inefficient funding for local innovative initiatives, SYNERGY goal is to enhance innovativeness in EU regions through strengthening linkages and beyond border cooperation to create synergy between SMEs, industry, research, intermediaries and policy makers.
The project scope is mainly oriented on Advanced Manufacturing with a special focus on the most promising modern industrial technologies in 3 Key Project’s Areas (KPAs): (1) Additive Manufacturing, (2) Micro- and nanotechnology-related processes and materials and (3) Industry 4.0.
The Fig. 2 presents an overall methodology of the project implementation. The concept of the SYNERGY project can be divided into 6 main steps illustrated below.
The first one is an analysis of running and finalized projects in 3 Key Project’s Areas. Then based on the results of the analysis, institutions that were realizing these projects, will be clustered into Synergic Consortia. The next step is to create living linkages among regional actors through innovative Synergic Networks within 3 KPAs. Members of the transnational Synergic Networks during workshops and meetings will define expectations of the new the Synergic Crowd Innovation Platform (SCIP). The SCIP will become a space for enhancement open innovation, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and microworking among project partners’ regions. The last phase of the project will be a set of pilot actions that will test the functionality of the SCIP. Additionally, “a ready to adopt” generic regional Crowd Innovation strategy will be prepared and presented to target groups during trainings.
Before mentioned steps comes from the project structure, that consists of 4 thematic work packages: Synergic profiling (WP T1), Synergic Networking (WP T2), Synergic Crowd Innovation Platform (WP T3) and Launching Synergic Platform (WP T4).
4.2 SYNERGY Work Plan
The main aim of the WP T1 was to build and deliver a method and tool to search, profile, cluster and reach innovation-oriented organizations based on their activities and experience gained from successful project realizations in order to enhance networking, matchmaking and linking regional actors from research, industry and intermediaries operating within 3 KPAs. The main goal of the WP T2 is to enable international cooperation to create 3 KPAs innovative Synergic Networks and to define needs for successful transregional cooperation based on crowd innovation through regional and international “Simulated Sharing” networking workshops and Design Thinking idea meetings. The main output of the project that fulfil the needs of enhancement Open Innovation in Central Europe is the Synergic Crowd Innovation Platform – SCIP. The WP T3 and T4 aim to develop and test this platform.
The user’s interface of the SYNERGY profiling IT tool developed within the WP T1 is presented in the Fig. 3. It is available via https://synpro.e-science.pl – at the moment, in the validation phase, with the restricted access for consortium members only.
The tool is composed of “Projects”, “Organizations” and “Map” modules. Presently, in the pilot phase, there are 208 projects and 112 organizations registered. The intelligent algorithms, based on graph theory, are being developed currently in order to efficiently and automatically cluster the projects and organizations according to selected criteria. The structure of the registered projects divided into 3 KPAs as well as organizations grouped by 9 countries can be found in the Fig. 4.
Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, the Project Leader, on the 24th of May 2018 organized the first regional “Simulated Sharing” networking workshop and the Design Thinking idea meeting. 17 participants from industrial companies, clusters, academia and intermediaries took part in the event. Participants were successfully discussing the barriers for efficient cooperation of science and business and ways to overcome them. Moreover, the initial and desired functionality of the Synergic Crowd Innovation Platform was defined. The project partners will organize parallel events in their regions and next, a common, international workshop is foreseen in September 2018. It will be a ground for establishment of the 3 Synergic Networks (one per KPA). The living Synergic Networks focused on 3 KPAs will enable researchers and representatives of industry to meet and share experiences in their fields to start transregional cooperation in Central Europe. Members of Synergic Networks will not only set up linkages among each other, but also will define needs for successful transregional cooperation reflecting requirements of all regional innovation actors and thus will define common functionality of the Synergic Crowd Innovation Platform. Moreover, the new services for regional actors from research, industry, intermediaries and local authorities operating within 3 KPAs will be defined and collected. It is expected that these services, implemented within the SCIP, will enable the members of the platform to exchange resources (HR, equipment, best practices), set up cooperation, build innovation friendly environment and enhance crowd innovation initiatives in Central Europe.
The basic idea of the SYNERGY project is to set up a platform ensuring crowdfunding and crowdsourcing for innovative solutions for the Central European society. As a part of functionality of the SCIP, a crowdfunding mechanism will be developed. It is planned to transfer best practices from American portal www.experiment.com. Within this approach every euro is contributed towards innovation and helps push the boundaries of knowledge. The people fund directly to the researchers and idea-givers, so there is no middleman or overhead involved (compared 50–60% when receiving a grant). Anyone can start a new project, as long as the results can be shared openly. Scientists, researchers, idea-givers will share progress, data, and results directly with their backers [15]. The SYNERGY will use the platform also to implement microworking, being an approach where community solves smaller tasks which are then reassembled into an overall result at the end. After the platform is launched a number of pilot actions is foreseen to test its functionality – e.g. “Simulated crowdfunding”, vouchers for research and innovation projects, “Rent-A-Robot”.
The platform will then be improved according to the results coming from the testing pilot actions. Also, on the basis for performed research on best practices and success stories related to crowd innovation and feedback coming from pilot actions, a strategy for regional public authorities, public organizations and Synergic Networks will be elaborated. Trainings will also be organized on Crowd Innovation Strategy in the project partners’ regions for regional public authorities, public organizations and Synergic Networks. Finally, three pilot actions will be implemented on promoting the SCIP and its services, such as: “Crowd innovation for companies”, vouchers for developed solutions of the research projects, “Design and prototype model”.
Synergic Crowd Innovation Platform is the most important output of the whole project because it will be an environment where all new services enhancing crowd innovation will be available. Entities from project partners’ and associated partners’ networks will be invited to meetings. Once the project has ended SCIP will be transferred into a spin-off at the Wroclaw University of Science and Technology (project leader). An agreed percentage (app. up to 10%) of the budget of the crowdfunding initiatives on the platform will be spent on the SCIP sustainability and on covering current costs. It is assumed that both the project and the associated partners will be using and disseminating such a platform after the duration of the project.
5 Summary
In the paper the new phenomena, tools and methods of Open Innovation were discussed. The concept of Open Innovation enhancement in Central Europe through implementation of the SYNERGY project was presented. A role of the project in terms of Quadruple Helix Innovation Model was mentioned. The special focus was put on description of the process of the Synergic Crowd Innovation Platform development and activities supporting this process – in order to underline the new, innovative and holistic approach of creating an effective cooperation environment, with particular emphasis on the area of Advanced Manufacturing. It is assumed that the variety of services planned as components of the SCIP and active participation of its potential users in the platform’s development process should result in an efficient enhancement and dissemination of Social Product Development in Central European regions. Helpful with this will be the newly-developed match-making open source online IT instrument.
An analysis of already performed activities leads to a conclusion that for the successful realization of the project, it is crucial to efficiently communicate it to the target audience. It is especially important in terms of launching the platform, which effective functioning will be possible only if an appropriate number of users is registered. Similarly, only through reaching appropriate target groups the events can be effectively organized and executed. What is more, the research performed within the paper leads to assumption that technological development causes an increased “computerisation” of jobs, which means that increasing number of jobs will become liable to digitalization. The phenomena of crowdsourcing that has recently emerged, can be defined also as a new form of organization of work. It can be observed that platforms built around it have evolved as an innovative instruments and new form of work organization.
Future research will focus not only on further development of the platform and set of complementary services, but also on development of new business models for Open Innovation in Advanced Manufacturing sector in Central Europe.
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Rosienkiewicz, M., Helman, J., Cholewa, M., Molasy, M. (2019). SYNERGY Project: Open Innovation Platform for Advanced Manufacturing in Central Europe. In: Burduk, A., Chlebus, E., Nowakowski, T., Tubis, A. (eds) Intelligent Systems in Production Engineering and Maintenance. ISPEM 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 835. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97490-3_30
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