INVITE

The topic of the proposed project is the co-designing and piloting demand-driven mechanisms, skill-sets and measures for stimulating and facilitating open innovation across European innovation systems. To this respect, INVITE envisages a well-connected European Open Innovation (OI) ecosystem, in which knowledge meaningfully flows across borders and is translated into marketable innovations, bringing increased socio-economic benefits to EU citizens.

To this end, INVITE applies a multi-stakeholder approach to co-design, pilot and demonstrate in diverse real-life settings demand-driven mechanisms, skill-sets and measures in order to facilitate OI. Three pilot actions have been adopted accordingly:

• An innovation voucher scheme will stimulate interactions between the demand and the supply of knowledge via an unconventional yet highly flexible way, namely virtual human capital mobility.

• A highly interactive and flexible e-learning intervention will empower EU businesses with the skill-sets to tap into EU’s knowledge-base and turn it into value

• A public-private co-investment scheme will leverage small amounts of public funds to increase participation of private investors in open and collaborative models of innovation.

All pilots will integrate OI support services that will appropriately scale to the needs and capabilities of each case and will be facilitated through open ICT tools. Along the process a participatory co-evaluation framework will keep track of the pilots’ performance and fuel iterative, user-driven refinements to generate results ready for scale up and replication. Dedicated business planning exercises in line with a tailored IPR strategy will pave the way for the launch of a pan-European service platform we dub as Open Innovation Lab, to the market, synergising with existing OI platforms and service offers to co-create value for the European OI ecosystem.

To this end, INVITE brings together a complementary and multi-disciplinary consortium, comprised of key players within the OI market including leading platform and service providers, international and regional support networks, ICT solution providers as well as private investor networks and pioneering in OI regional development agencies.

Consortium

• Q-PLAN INTERNATIONAL ADVISORS PC (Q-PLAN) – Greece

• STEINBEIS INNOVATION GGMBH (SEZ) – Germany

• EUROPE UNLIMITED S.A. (E-UNLIMITED) – Belgium

• RTC NORTH LIMITED (RTC NORTH) – United Kingdom

• NINESIGMA EUROPE BVBA (NINESIGMA) – Belgium

• INTRASOFT INTERNATIONAL SA (INTRASOFT) – Luxembourg

• ETHNIKO KENTRO EREVNAS KAI TECHNOLOGIKIS ANAPTYXIS (CERTH/ITI) – Greece

• WIRTSCHAFTSFOERDERUNG REGION STUTTGART GMBH (WRS) – Germany

• THE DURHAM, GATESHEAD, NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, NORTH TYNESIDE, NORTHUMBERLAND, SOUTH TYNESIDE AND SUNDERLAND COMBINED AUTHORITY (NELEP) – United Kingdom