World Technopolis Review

World Technopolis Association (세계과학도시연합)
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The "open incubation model": deriving community-driven value and innovation in the incubation process

  • Received : 2014.11.04
  • Accepted : 2015.03.11
  • Published : 2015.03.31
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Abstract

Globalization, increasing technological advancements and dynamic knowledge diffusion are moving our world closer together at a unique scale and pace. At the same time, our rapidly changing society is confronted with major challenges ranging from demographic to economic ones; challenges that necessitate highly innovative solutions, forcing us to reconsider the way that we actually innovate and create shared value. As such the linear, centralized innovation models of the past need to be replaced with new approaches; approaches that are based upon an open and collaborative, global network perspective where all innovation actors strategically network and collaborate, openly distribute their ideas and co-innovate/co-create in a global context utilizing our society's full innovation potential (Innovation 4.0 - Open Innovation 2.0). These emerging innovation paradigms create "an opportunity for a new entrepreneurial renaissance which can drive a Cambrian like explosion of sustainable wealth creation" (Curley 2013). Thus, in order to materialize this entrepreneurial renaissance, it is critical not only to value but also to actively employ this new innovation paradigms so as to derive community-driven shared value that stems from global innovation networks. This paper argues that there is a gap in existing business incubation model that needs to be filled, in that the innovation and entrepreneurship community cannot afford to ignore the emerging innovation paradigms and rely upon closed incubation models but has to adopt an "open incubation" (Ziouvelou 2013). The open incubation model is based on the principles of open innovation, crowdsourcing and co-creation of shared value and enables individual users and innovation stakeholders to strategically network, find collaborators and partners, co-create ideas and prototypes, share their ideas/prototypes and utilize the wisdom of the crowd to assess the value of these project ideas/prototypes, while at the same time find connections/partners, business and technical information, knowledge on start-up related topics, online tools, online content, open data and open educational material and most importantly access to capital and crowd-funding. By introducing a new incubation phase, namely the "interest phase", open incubation bridges the gap between entrepreneurial need and action and addresses the wantpreneurial needs during the innovation conception phase. In this context one such ecosystem that aligns fully with the open incubation model and theoretical approach, is the VOICE ecosystem. VOICE is an international, community-driven innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem based on open innovation, crowdsourcing and co-creation principles that has no physical location as opposed to traditional business incubators. VOICE aims to tap into the collective intelligence of the crowd and turn their entrepreneurial interest or need into a collaborative project that will result into a prototype and to a successful "crowd-venture".

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References

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