OI2.0 Conference Founder and Adviser for Innovation Systems at the European Commission, Directorate General for Communications, Network, Content, and Technology (DG CONNECT) Mr. Bror Salmelin:
“Cluj-Napoca has outperformed our expectations and set a new standard for the upcoming OI2.0 Conference editions. The impressive performance of Open Innovation 2.0 Conference and its related events in Cluj-Napoca propels the co-creation of innovation ecosystems across Europe.”
The Open Innovation 2.0 2017 events series drew to a close on the 14th of June in Cluj-Napoca after five action-intense days. More than 500 guests from 20 countries attended the open innovation 2.0 workshops and seminars, conducted by 70 speakers under the lead theme of “digital innovation” – a new record in terms of participation and national diversity.
This year’s global span on the cooperation for innovation across the entire Europe and with Japan had a major impact from the beginning.
What set apart Open Innovation 2.0 Conference in Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania, Romania was the fact that the organizers entangled a series of events starting with the city’s first Innovation Dialogue on June 10th and 11th, followed by the Clusters Matchmaking on June 12th, the first Town Hall Debate chaired by the Committee of Regions on June 13th. The events culminated in the 2-day OI2.0 Conference itself and the Innovation Luminary Awards Ceremony in the evening of June 13th, announcing this year’s winners of the much-awaited prizes.
The guests were particularly impressed with the practical aspects revealed by the Block-chain, VUCA (Volatility-Uncertainty-Complexity-Ambiguity) Times and STARTS (Science Technology and Arts) plenary session.
“The conference’s approach embraces multiple aspects of the society and the transformative power of digitalization. The talks and related debates triggered the participants to contribute and come up with solutions,” remarked Mr, Salmelin, adding: “The twelve publicly presented Conference Conclusions propel OI2.0 as the platform for digital innovation, they encourage the OISPG community to trial and give feedback, while the mechanism of the Industry Commons OI2.0 enables safely building disruptive innovation on top of existing industry capabilities. We noted also that Europe is called to be active in creating open bus architecture for DLT, to extend the dialogue with Japan for managing societal change and The European Commission is suggested to tailor its support offerings based on unique characteristics of different ecosystems. It is also crucial that Open Innovation 2.0 ecosystems be created as a service to ensure rapid experimentation and prototyping in quadruple helix settings, enabling easy and fast access to co-creation spaces geographically or thematically.”
It was therefore relevant that representatives of the CLUSTERIX 2.0 Interreg Europe project - Cornelia Muraru from INMA (Romania) and Gál Körmendy from West- Pannon Nonprofit Ltd (Hungary) - could introduce to the audience their new models of innovation for strategic cluster partnerships. They emphasized the need and importance of innovation networking and the orchestrating role of clusters of the interaction activities within the members of the ecosystem, admitting the need for easy-to-use and tailored digital interfaces in managing any cooperation of this size. Any action (cooperative innovation more than most) needs internal motivation and external enablers to be in place and the two CLUSTERIX projects demonstrate through their activities how inter-regional learning at policy level can shape future-oriented environments.
Ms. Emiliya Hubavenska – Information and Communication assistant at the European Commission DG CONNECT referred to the mood of the events as upbeat, and stated that the OI2.0 Conference in Cluj-Napoca met a general positive response and had a powerful impact.
“The OI2.0 Events Ecosystem concept brought a new perspective and lot of fresh ideas on the table. It generated synergies between different actors participating at the events and connected the specific topics building the platform for open discussions and interactions.”
For more information, visit:
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/open-innovation-20-conference-2017
