Transcript The contribution of social innovation to smart

The contribution of social innovation
to smart specialisation strategies
Pedro Marques, Cardiff University
Kevin Morgan, Cardiff University
Ranald Richardson, Newcastle University
Adrian Healey, Cardiff University
Smart Specialisation for Regional Innovation (SmartSpec)
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/cplan/research/smartspec
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for
research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement number 320131.
Structure of presentation
•
What is social innovation?
•
Social innovation and smart specialisation
•
The challenge of ageing:
– Social innovation as a complement
– Social innovation as a challenge
– Social innovation and the lack of community
•
Concluding remarks
What is social innovation?
Process underlines all types of social innovation
Social innovation as context dependent
Social innovation and smart
specialisation
1.
Choices: RIS3 is about the selection of a few investment priorities based on a process of entrepreneurial discovery to identify
promising areas for specialization.
i.
2.
Competitive advantage: RIS3 builds on current regional economic specialisation and mobilises talent by matching RTD+I and
business needs and capacities.
ii.
3.
SI could contribute by identifying areas of activity that are not currently being considered by economic agents
operating under traditional innovation models.
Introducing an SI component into RIS 3 strategies would help highlight ways in which current RTD+I strengths could be
used differently to stimulate innovation.
Critical mass: RIS3 aims at developing world class excellence clusters and providing arenas for related variety and crosssectoral links which drive specialised technological diversification;
iii. An SI approach can help identify new areas of activity, which can feed into new, albeit related, areas of specialisation.
4.
Collaborative leadership: RIS3 is the result of collective endeavour involving not only the academic world, public authorities
and the business community, but also innovation users.
iv.
The development of new goods and services with an SI approach would have to incorporate the notion that some
user groups might be hard to reach, for example because they lack financial resources or because they are socially
excluded.
Social innovation and ageing (1)
• Social innovation as a complement to ageing policies
– Delivery: need for integrated approaches leads to
necessity to engage with users and communities
– Feedback: need to engage with users and communities to
inform progress of STI, policy, public service deliver, etc.
Social innovation and ageing (2)
• Social innovation as a challenge to ageing policies
– Delivery: in cases where mainstream policies are locked
into treatment and technological development they will
struggle to implement socially innovative approaches
– Feedback: knowledge fed back from community
engagement might challenge private sector or public
sector preferences
Social innovation and ageing (3)
• Social innovation and the lack of community
– Delivery: lack of resources to engage with users and
communities hinders effective ageing policies
– Feedback: elderly do not exist as a cohesive community,
which makes it harder to coalesce around which elements
should be in integrated approaches
Concluding remarks
• Social innovation has potential to make contribution
to smart specialisation policies. But…
• … there is a possibility that social innovation is not
important or relevant for smart specialisation
• Also social innovation still has to prove that it adds
value to concepts that already exist