INVITE

INVITE was set on creating 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 applied 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:

• An innovation voucher scheme that stimulated interactions between the demand and the supply of knowledge via short-term virtual human capital mobility;
• A flexible e-learning intervention which empowered EU businesses with the skill-sets to tap into EU’s knowledge and turn it into value; and
• A public-private co-investment scheme that leveraged small amounts of public funds to increase participation of private investors in open innovation.

All pilots integrated OI support services that appropriately scaled to the needs and capabilities of each case with the help of dedicated ICT tools. Along the process, a participatory co-evaluation framework kept track of the pilots’ performance and fuelled iterative, user-driven refinements to generate results ready for scale up and replication. Dedicated business planning exercises in line with a tailored IPR strategy paved the way for the exploitation of the project’s platform, namely the OI2Lab) with  a view to synergising with existing OI platforms and service offers.