Dimitrios Pontikakis, Ignacio Gonzalez Vazquez, Guia Bianchi, Marina Ranga, Anabela Marques Santos, Solange Mifsud, Ramojus Reimeris (p), Carmen Madrid

Attila Havas

The European Green Deal and the unprecedented European effort to foster socio-economic transformation and build a resilient and sustainable EU bring to the fore an upgraded role for innovation. In this context, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) is developing a new generation of development strategies fit for the green and digital transition: Innovation Strategies for Sustainability ('S4' in short).
S4 seeks to promote transformative innovation and amplify impact by facilitating coordination across policy silos and identifying missing synergies between the efforts of stakeholders. S4 requires new ways of working across government departments and levels focused on addressing local challenges.
S4 seeks to accelerate transformative outcomes by introducing among others:
• Challenge-oriented innovation (/local missions) as a way to overcome policy silos, engage with underrepresented social groups and deliver impact within pre-defined timeframes;
• Policy mixes for system-level innovation that include interventions from outside the traditional confines of R&I policy but are now crucial for transformation that results in co-benefits (such as employment, social, fiscal policy and also line ministries in charge of environment, energy, health, transport, waste and public infrastructures);
• Regulation as a tool for innovation (such as experimentation in 'regulatory sandboxes' and the strategic use of more stringent regulatory standards for innovation)
• Concerted use of other demand-side policies (such as the creation of lead markets, the creation of innovation spaces during large physical investments, support for innovation for affordability).
• Tools that mobilise multiple sources of funding for the same goal, encourage stakeholders to open up their agendas to facilitate coordination, co-opt stakeholder contributions beyond co-funding, enlist demand-side interventions across domains in strategic planning for innovation and engage with vulnerable social groups.

As S4 is in an exploratory and experimental phase of its development, a S4 Playbook and a pilot exercise have been developed to provide guidance for experimentation, without being prescriptive. S4 is structured around three operational pillars: A Strategic Framework that allows broader and dynamic planning; An Open Discovery Process that allows for engagement and path co-creation with variable sets of stakeholders working backwards from desired societal outcomes; A Policy and Action Mix that goes beyond publicly-funded projects, mobilises the right policy instruments and sequences them against other actions so that they result in synergies by design and importantly, co-opts additional actions by stakeholders.

Atilla Havas (p), Doris Schartinger, Matthias K. Weber

Ramojus Reimeris

Transformative change has become the focus of various strands of innovation research in recent years. This paper focuses on the contributions of three main strands of innovation research to analyse goal-oriented transformative change, namely i) innovation studies; ii) social innovation research; and iii) transitions research. Drawing on a focussed literature review, we characterise the three strands of literature along the key features of innovation processes, namely: the principal aim of innovations, the ‘subject’ and the levels of change, the main actors and their interactions during an innovation process, the sources and types of knowledge (co-)produced, utilised and exchanged, how success and impact are defined and measured, and the diffusion mechanisms. We also discuss how transformation dynamics is understood in these strands of the literature.
We argue that mutual learning among the three strands’ scholars is needed as a foundation of a deeper understanding of goal-oriented transformation processes. An integrative framework would offer various advantages.
We might arrive at a better understanding of normative issues. To explore meaningful normative ambitions we need transparent, more appropriate – and cost-efficient – methods for organising normative dialogues, better serving societal needs. Those dialogues can identify inevitable tensions among countries and social groups with different experience, worldviews, values, and ambitions and after participatory, systematic deliberations the actors can arrive at shared visions, specific objectives, and joint, effective actions.
A common framing of goal-oriented transformations in society would also advance theory building. We consider the following main building blocks of a new, integrative framework: i) goals of change; ii) types and levels of change; iii) sources of change; iv) processes and mechanisms of change; and v) a set of criteria to assess the impacts of transformations.
Strategic and policy implications could also be derived. An integrated approach to goal-oriented transformations can underpin more effective strategies for various types of actors, as well as more effective public policies. While there are inevitable tensions among the different types of actors, there are also complementarities among them in terms of their capabilities and opportunities to act, e.g., when orchestration of changing technologies, infrastructures, social and business networks, cognitive frames, institutions, and social practices is needed to set in motion certain goal-oriented transformation processes. This is a practical implication for innovators – ‘change agents’ – who need several, if not all types of approaches currently ‘treated’ in isolated ways in the three strands in terms of theorising, policy-making, and acting.