El reto de innovación abierta como instrumento público para desarrollar nuevas soluciones TIC en territorios mediterráneos

Abstract

The Information Society, driven by the development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), is modifying market rules at fast-paced speeds. The life cycles of products are going from lasting a decade to just a few years or even months. New business models based on ICT are putting businesses at risk that have been operating for decades. The consumer imposes their needs and tastes, creating new market niches ("long tail" models) that are viable thanks to ICT. In addition, companies are aware that there is extensive knowledge and talent that they must exploit to innovate and remain competitive. Therefore, knowledge becomes a fundamental asset that must be managed by companies, and open innovation is positioned as a way of articulating new mechanisms that allow access to this external knowledge. The public sector cannot remain impassive with respect to these rapid changes and must adapt to remain useful to citizens. This implies that Public Administrations have to adopt new ways of innovating, inspired by the private sector, that allow them to accelerate innovation processes and at the same time maximise the results of public resources devoted to innovation. The secret to success of these new ways of innovating lies in ICT, which allow sharing of high-value information in a simple and accessible way, performing low-cost experiments to confirm hypotheses, and accessing collective intelligence to solve problems and meet needs. The Public Administration is no longer limited by its own resources to improve the welfare of citizens. ICT, combined with new ways of working and addressing problems, allow access to external knowledge and talent to successfully address the problems and needs of the administration. It is in this context where the open innovation challenge is emerging as a new public instrument that allows: access to external knowledge and talent, innovation processes globalisation and acceleration, budget optimisation, new knowledge generation from different points of view, promotion of entrepreneurship, and be an adequate and viable alternative to a public tender. This research is based on the scientific method: observation and induction to study the challenges in Anglo-Saxon territories and extract its general principles; hypothesis to propose and develop a methodology to guide, step by step, the launching of open innovation challenges by the public sector in Mediterranean territories; experimentation to test the proposed methodology on a real experience designed to address a problem in the field of health; demonstration based on the analysis of the results obtained in the real experience that allow the validation of the proposed methodology; and finally the conclusions or scientific theory. The objective of this research is to contribute to the use of the open innovation challenge as a public innovation instrument by the Public Administrations of Mediterranean territories. The aim is to help public officials to use new ways of innovating to develop novel public services adapted to the real needs of a diverse citizenship, while optimising the results of innovation budgets.