Mapping. FEUGA. Conceptualising Open Innovation Communities
Once the SUSMILK project had been set up – in the context of the 7 Programme Framework for the development of a sustainable concept for the dairy industry in Europe – one of the actions that had to be set in train was the definition and deployment of the Open Innovation Communities. The objective was to distribute the results that were coming in during the execution of the project in question, by means of designing an action plan for these communities and an Open Innovation tool or dynamic to energise it. With the activity under the leadership of the Fundación Empresa-Universidad Gallega (Galician University – Company Foundation - FEUGA) in collaboration with two more project partners, the scheme was set up to conceptualise and define the action involved in handling the Open Innovation tool to be developed, energised, implemented and distributed. The first step in the procedure was to hold a session with all three partners present to map the starting point – in other words, to achieve an in-depth understanding of the requirements used as the springboard to generate the initial working hypotheses. The goals of the session were as follows:
• To understand the starting point of the project, to define its limits and to visualise the starting point for the research;
• To define the limits of the various interest groups/stakeholders, to personalise them via the Persona tool and to attempt to produce an initial Empathy Map with the aim of placing ourselves in their shoes;
• To conceptualise preliminary digital tool/community solutions or models in order to grasp the problem (known as Fast Forward, this is a technique whereby you fast track towards the end of the process with the aim of generating the hypotheses for the research via a definition of the basic ideas);
• To define hypotheses for plusses or minuses, otherwise known as Pains & Gains, which can be developed for research validation.
Starting with the goal of energising the connection between the various stakeholders in the project with a view to generating a genuine establishment of innovation cells, step one is to use the In/Out tool in order to establish the limits of the project and position the team at the same point. Once an open dialogue on the subject has been generated, the end of the process is to assess the project's progress, along with definite end goals for the joint definition of the limits of the Communities Action Plan and the digital tool.
Once the starting point is identified, the next step, with the know-how of the participants, is to identify the players, plus the actual interactions between them in the context of the sector, firmly prioritising our public objective (Stakeholders Map, Persona, ERAF Systems Diagram). To define the hypotheses that would guide the process in the subsequent research and validation stages we made a more accurate definition of the users by means of tools like Persona or the Empathy Map with a view to performing the exercise by placing ourselves in the shoes of the users.
We then created a Stakeholders’ Map, where the areas occupied by the partners and the focus of the community were: food industry (with three subcategories), food research (with three subcategories), associations, platforms and clusters (with six subcategories), communications media (with five subcategories) and administration (with four categories). The range of the actors involved was too great to structure, so we were obliged to reorganize them.
With relatively clear goals, the project as clarified was to define the range of types of communities via direct consultation with the stakeholders and actual partners in the project.
Starting from a definition of the services to be offered to the members of these communities, we established the need to outline and design the use of online and offline tools in order to energise these communities and ensure that open innovation would be a reality.
Once we could see our users in a more human and personalised way, we proceeded to identify the goals for the various users in order to achieve a clearer focus of ideas. Goals were clarified via a brainstorming session, and we now observed a number of clear action directions in keeping with the initial perception of the users’ needs which established the different hypotheses for the research (greater visibility and access to information, among others).
