• The project created a comprehensive understanding how the innovation processes are organised and managed in European companies. The sample covered eleven countries, five industry sectors and all sizes of companies excluding, however, the start-ups. From this perspective, the IIT study is the largest and most comprehensive study of these issues conducted in Europe.
• The innovation processes have changed during the last five years. Innovation happens in ecosystems where key partners and stakeholders work together. Customers are the most important partners but it was most interesting to notice that the second important partners were public research institutions. The key conclusion is that innovation is dependent on the companies’ ability to find and collaborate with the key ecosystem partners. It also requires that companies have enough competence to agree upon the rules of the game in such a way that every partners in the ecosystem can benefit from the collaboration. This raises also a very important policy challenge. Policy must ensure that the innovation environment can provide all the required elements. In particular, it is important to identify who can take the role of the systems integrator, what is the emerging value chain and its control points and that all the critical elements are made available in advance.
• Ecosystems play critical role both in the implementation of the innovation process and the analysis of the future business environment.
• Open innovation has become a standards tool for companies’ innovation toolbox. It was, however, interesting to notice that there are almost as many interpretations of open innovation as there were interviewed companies. Collaboration is a standard tool, but how it is organized and what are rules to manage the Intellectual property varied. It is clear that more definitions and ‘good practice’ solutions should be made available to reduce the existing confusion.
• New innovation tools such as social media, web enabled tools and big date are widely utilized by companies, but again there is much development needed to make the use of these instruments useful for companies.
• Innovation process is in many cases still dominated by the traditional stage-gate model. At the same time, companies are actively looking for possibilities to make the process more flexible. New independent business units for innovation, innovation boards, customer involvement right from the beginning of the process are practical tools to improve the flexibility as well as the speed-up the process. The web tools are also used in this context.
• The project has produced a review of the innovation policy performance in all countries covered. This will provide an opportunity for countries to compare their performance and identify which are the most critical challenges they need to address to improve their innovation performance. The project produced also a list of the most critical barriers to innovation and preliminary list of recommendation how to eliminate these barriers. The discussions with governments and industry will produce a more detailed list of recommendations, which will address the required reforms in innovation policy both at the national and at the international levels in Europe.
