A National Open Innovation Strategy for Austria

On Monday 18th January 2016, the Austrian Federal Ministeries BMVIT, BMWFW and Austrian Council (RFTE) together with winnovation hosted an Open Innovation Strategy Stakeholder Workshop as an important first step in gaining feedback and ideas from Austrian society for the development of a new Open Innovation Strategy for Austria (www.openinnovation.gv.at), a first of its kind globally.

Bellow you can read more about this initiative:

“This process, strongly supported by State Secretary Mahrer, began during summer 2015 after a successful scoping report initiated by the Julius Raab Stiftung and supported by winnovation led to discussions around the possibility that citizens could make contributions online towards the development of a new national Open Innovation Strategy for Austria. In fall 2016, work began to analyse the current state of play within the Austrian innovation system in parallel with an international analysis of leading countries around the world with respect to their innovation activities.

After publicly announcing the initiative and providing a platform for citizens to leave thoughts and comments, the Stakeholder Workshop was designed to capture the insights, needs and wishes of Austrian Society across a number of areas highlighted as starting points upon which to develop measures.

413 participants, representing the economic sector, policy, science and civil society, participated in the workshop. Mr. Christoph Leitl, President of Wirtschaftskammer Österreich (WKÖ), Mr. Hannes Androsch, Austrian Council for Research and Technology Development (RFTE), Mr. Alois Stöger, Federal Minister for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) (via video) and Mr. Harald Mahrer, State Secretary in the Federal Ministry for Science, Research and Industry provided opening remarks, highlighting the importance of implementing such a strategy given Austria’s position has fallen within international innovation rankings in recent years, and that the development of this new Open Innovation Strategy is a crucial step for Austria in becoming an innovation leader internationally.

We are particularly proud of our very own CEO, Mrs. Gertraud Leimueller who delivered a keynote speech focusing on the importance of Open Innovation throughout history in different sectors of society, the benefits of Open Innovation, and how Austria could implement Open Innovation across society to achieve great advantages nationally and within the global arena, which was well received by participants.

Various scenarios set with a vision of how the innovation system in Austria could look like in 2030 were posed to participants in order to enable a vision of the future for Austria within a more realistic and achievable time frame. Participants were happy to have the opportunity to contribute to the process and were enthusiastically engaged during the breakout sessions, with many useful ideas and comments captured during the sessions. Encouraging creativity during the school years and beyond, reducing the fear of experimenting, solving issues associated with IPR and finding appropriate ways to compensate user participation and crowdsourcing were some topics highlighted during the expert panel discussions that took place after the breakout sessions.

As a result of this rich data capture from participants, a reworking of the scenarios and proposed measures will take place in order to present a first draft of the strategy, which will be placed online for public consultation at the beginning of February 2016.

The final Open Innovation Strategy document should go to parliament by Summer 2016.

Here is the link where you can find the videos from this workshop and other information,  in German only; https://openinnovation.gv.at/rueckblick-workshop/

image credit: Dollar Photo Club

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Anne Swanson is a Research & Innovation consultant at Winnovation,  an international innovation consulting firm focused on open innovation. Her expertise is in research and innovation, open innovation, higher education management, regional and national innovation systems, rural affairs and agri-business, and industrial design. Email Anne at office@winnovation.at