Keywords

1 Introduction

The term of Knowledge Society has been (re)introduced over two decades ago [1,2,3,4], while Mesopotamia inspired some of the most important developments in human history, Egypt, Babylon, China, Greece, Rome, Mayas and others were Knowledge Societies. In these societies, knowledge was reserved to the elite or was open. Huge amount of past knowledge disappeared with decline, has been lost lack of knowledge transfer or simply “replaced” by new trends, due to human nature.

Today some consider that Knowledge Society involves necessarily higher education and combine research and technology in the innovation process leading to entrepreneurship and job creation [5,6,7].

UNESCO works to create inclusive knowledge societies and empower local communities by increasing access to, preservation, and sharing of information and knowledge in all of UNESCO’s domains. Knowledge societies must build on four pillars: freedom of expression; universal access to information and knowledge; respect for cultural and linguistic diversity; and quality education for all [8]. They believe that universal access to information is key to building peace, sustainable economic development, and intercultural dialogue. Promoting “Open Access to Scientific Information, Open Educational Resources, Free and Open Source Software, an Open Training Platform and Open and Distance Learning allow researchers and innovators to more easily share and use data” and provide students and educators from around the world have access to knowledge and information. UNESCO contributes to international debates on internet governance, through participation in the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). UNESCO does not provide any platform for knowledge storing, sharing and fructifying.

The European Union (EU) in the Treaty of Lisbon makes link between three pillars: education, research and innovation necessary for facing today challenges [5]. Open Innovation, Open Science and Opening to the World [9] strategy is promoted via Digital Single Market [6, 10] where technology transfer and start-ups are encouraged. The Digital Single Market strategy includes all technologies such as ICT, Future Internet, nano and biotechnology, artificial intelligence including robots, IoT, 3D, virtual reality, etc. Education and training programs follow this trend.

Such a limited choice of skills to develop may lead to disappearing of basic skills and activities essential for the sustainability of the whole society ecosystems.

Emerging interest for social innovation may improve this situation.

Except the EU Cordis base [11] providing information on all research programs and results, this strategy lacks of essential environment for exploring easily all available information and knowledge to face today challenges.

The environmental concern, mostly limited today to CO2 emission reduction, optimizing of energy and transportation as well as to water protection is a potential source of innovation and business. Several EU programs are devoted to these topics. Various initiatives in many countries may inspire other people and organizations. The European platform EIT (European Institute of Innovation and Technology) groups the research on climate, food, raw materials, energy and mobility [13].

The current pandemic of COVID19 demands finding quickly an effective solution to stop it. Solving such a problem requires worldwide collaboration between all involved actors and smart organization of all this knowledge. Emerald offer free access to related research papers [12]. Researchers working on vaccine have already taken some initiatives of such collaboration; however, a common platform for sharing the results and eco-innovating does not exist yet.

This paper presents main components of innovation ecosystems and discusses the conditions for sustainable and successful innovation in the context of knowledge society, ubiquitous digitalization and third hype of artificial intelligence. Environmental aspects of innovation are also discussed in aim inspiring eco-design and eco-innovation.

After introduction, the concept of innovation ecosystems is presented as well as some conditions for balance are given.

The described next architecture of proposed platform for Global Knowledge Society supporting the knowledge innovation ecosystems includes the most important components and the best of technology in aim accelerating the innovation process and serving all involved actors.

This article ends by concluding remarks and some perspectives of future work.

2 Main System Components of Innovation Ecosystems

Numerous definitions of Innovation Ecosystems are available in the literature [4, 6, 14, 18]. We propose to consider those presented in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Innovation Ecosystems [14]

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These innovation ecosystems are composed of system elements: companies, research, government, education, technology and start-up/SME. All these elements interact and influence each other. As it represents the real situation in France and certainly other countries, some connections are one way only what affects the balance of these ecosystems and the sustainable success of innovation as well.

The innovation ecosystems interact with natural ecosystems; for example, quickly developing and changing technology use raw materials and generate waste. Planned obsolescence [15] is embedded in hardware and software as well. Exponentially increasing amount of data requires more Data Centers generating heat and cooling them is a big challenge. Few of them prototype circular energy [10, 30].

Some applications prevent human from thinking because the automated systems with embedded artificial intelligence replace human reasoning, intervention and interaction. There are also very useful applications helping people performing better their activities.

Education preparing the skills for the future has a great role to play in this context.

This model focuses on research while educational system has to explore all talents and produce all necessary skills to preserve the balance, for example cultivators, builders, service providers, etc.

  1. A.

    The Role of Education

Education is a base of the innovation culture. While absorption of knowledge is encouraged in Europe, many skills and experiences are wasted and many are missing in the current context. There is a lack of maps and a strategy of knowledge dynamics for values creation, lack of forecast. Most of universities follow trends instead of leading. The Ministry of Education does not always accept the innovative programs proposed by some visionary beyond their time.

Web, Multimedia and ICT have provided new possibilities of “knowledge diffusion” and exchange vie e-learning, m-learning and training using various methods, including serious games, virtual reality and videos for learning gestures [19]. Many MOOCs are now available on line.

However, most of channels are mainly one way. Learning on line is complementary to live learning and give access to many. The creativity and collective intelligence that are cornerstone for innovation need more than on line knowledge absorbing.

As mentioned previously, the EU Lisbon strategy [5] considers 3 pillars: education, research & innovation.

According to Jacques Delors [32] the objectives of educational programs are learning to Know, learning to Do, learning to Live and learning to Be. These points are a part of the innovation culture. Mercier-Laurent [14] adds learning what to learn, learn to listen and understand, and learn how to solve problems using knowledge.

Developed countries are in transition from industrial era to the Knowledge Economy, which involves some essential changes. Table 1 presents some changes related to the above transition.

Table 1. Some changes induced by Knowledge Economy [14]
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This dynamic context induces the new focus and new roles, compared to industrial era. Some on them are highlighted in the Table 2. For example, the role of enterprise manager changes from planning, organizing, staffing and controlling to leader, visionary and strategist, focused on sustainable success; those of R&D manager changes from Managing R&D project to managing the eco-innovation dynamics. Manager of Human resource has to find and manage talents and Intellectual Capital [14, 25]. Financial manager focused today on ROI, has to manage organizational innovative capacity and add to ROI intangible values.

Table 2. Contrast in managerial roles [14]
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Education should also prepare for entrepreneur role. The dynamic world we live requires flexibility – for ex. Artificial intelligence evolves some professional activities and demands needs new talents.

The innovation in educational programs and training as well as detection and management of talents contribute to the balance of innovation ecosystems.

  1. B.

    Research Start-up and other enterprises

The sustainable success of innovation requires two ways communication between components shown in Fig. 1, while the majority focuses only on one – pushing the research results to companies. The other way may be much more challenging for research. PhD and other researchers may find interest in challenging complex problems to solve, that can be consider at individual level or in collaborative projects, often multi-disciplinary.

In search of boosting economic growth, since several years universities in Europe has been encouraged the PhD students for transferring their research results to start-ups. Department of technology transfer offers project evaluation and links to funds. As the evaluation system does not encourage the entrepreneurship, some students prefer to continue as researchers. Star-up is risky and many afraid to fail.

Research policies, evaluation and ranking systems, synergy with companies and consideration of environmental impacts contribute all to the balance.

The well-organized and managed knowledge flow supported by right technology as a blood feed the exchanges facilitating creativity and transformation of ideas into sustainable success.

Innovation ecosystems are the cornerstone of the prosperous Knowledge Society.

  1. C.

    Role of Politics

Government is in charge of innovation policies, of educational programs, of research policies and incentives for star-ups and small companies. They are supposed to have a vision of country development, set environmental rules, and decide taxes and regulation. They inform the targeted population about the laws, plans and principles to follow, but citizens have a very weak influence. All this activity related to innovation ecosystems requires two ways communication and integration of feedback from the involved actors.

The European Union elaborated a very complex strategy in Innovation Union, described in details in [10]. The plan contained over 30 action points and aimed to do 3 things

  • make Europe into a world-class science performer

  • remove obstacles to innovation like expensive patenting, market fragmentation, slow standard-setting and skills shortages

  • revolutionise the way public and private sectors work together, notably through Innovation Partnerships between the European institutions, national and regional authorities and business.

Its implementation [26] evolves from experience, but still needs improvement to achieve the mentioned goals. The skills shortage mentioned above demonstrates the urgent need for the skills/competency management system [25]. Among the last actions is the implementation of the research results.

Paradoxically in the documents that applicants (researchers/SME) have to fill when applying for funding [33] implementation is mentioned, however only the research results are evaluated during the mi-term review of sponsored project. Without overall change in project evaluation for funding and review of sponsored project, the expected implementation will stay weak, because the incentive are insufficient.

The association Knowledge 4 Innovation [27] make efforts to help members of European Parliament in improving the innovation policies to achieve the stated goal.

  1. D.

    Technology

Technology and in particular artificial intelligence approaches and techniques plays an essential role in the innovation ecosystems by supporting the whole process, presented in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Innovation process [14]

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An application to manage the whole process can integrate a generator of ideas implemented in “box of ideas”. Such a box will be certainly useful in many companies to collect ideas of employees, partners and stakeholders. In most of them only R&D department can innovate, while many interesting ideas can come from other employees and from outside.

At the university and in schools such a box may help improving the programs or/and pedagogical methods.

The collected ideas are evaluated. At least three specialists have to check technological feasibility, market and availability of skills and competencies necessary for successful transformation of selected ideas.

At the beginning of the transformation of idea into commercial product or service, it is vital to verify some constraints before doing. It avoid the productivity paradox [4]. At this stage, it is possible to use simulators to verify the factors as feasibility, existing market, competitors, return on investment in term of tangible and intangible values and environmental impact. In the case of product simulator can help finding the best raw material and select the best design for recyclability.

  1. E.

    Environment

All human activities generate impacts on environment. Technology, however very useful, generates a lot of waste; produces heat and affect our health. Despite numerous actions and incentives aiming in raise awareness, greedy economy and planned obsolescence reign. Greedy economy is probably among the causes of COVID19 pandemic.

The eco-design aims in integrating environmental concern via norms (ISO 26000), sometimes very heavy to apply. The partners of national sponsored project Convergence [28] developed a game to consider environmental aspects of products. EIT Platform for Innovation Community [13] includes groups working on reducing main environmental impacts.

The recent EU policy aims in protecting the environment and seeks to minimize risks to climate, human health and biodiversity. The European Green Deal aims to make Europe the world’s first climate-neutral continent, in part by developing cleaner sources of energy and green technologies [29]. The emphasis is on biodiversity, climate, energy, and circular economy. The EU circular economy plan includes measures from production and consumption to waste management, and the market for secondary raw materials.

Nevertheless, the economic giants do not demonstrate their active involvement in Planet protection.

  1. F.

    Impacts

At least seven impacts of innovation, presented in Fig. 3 should be considered and evaluated, preferably before implementation.

Fig. 3.
figure 3

Impacts of innovation [10]

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The impact on health has to be added here, as many innovations affects directly or indirectly our health.

Generally, the reviewers of innovative projects are concerned with technological impact; sometimes with environmental and societal (Corporate Social Responsibility), but quite never with cognitive, cultural and on health. Some evaluate economic impact, but it depends strongly on professional who evaluates. Innovative project may also produce political impact in term of suggestions on improvement of innovation policies.

According to definition of Debra Amidon [4]

“Creation, evolution, exchange and application of new ideas into marketable goods and services for:

  • the success of an enterprise

  • the vitality of a nation’s economy

  • the advancement of society”

the innovation has a potential to ensure the success of the businesses, enhance the vitality of a nation’s economy and bring a contribution to advancement of society. Amidon call it innovation holonomy addressing micro-, mezzo- and macro levels of society.

Innovation nourishes by knowledge. The success of innovation depends on smart organization and optimization of related internal and external knowledge (knowledge flow). Only such organization and implementation can provide the relevant and immediate access to the elements with potential to accelerate innovation.

3 Example of Platform for Global Knowledge Society

More than ever, today we have access to a plethora of various applications on servers, clouds, computers, smart phone and IoT in many fields. However, a world platform providing immediate access to relevant data, information or knowledge is still missing. This can be used for inspiration and reuse and to avoid errors as well.

There is still too much lost, forgotten or hidden knowledge. European programs have produced an extraordinary amount of technologies and solutions [34]; most of them are not easy to find with traditional search engine and remain not known. The recent results are publish in [35].

We still loose time searching, even when using very performing engines. It is not easy to find instantaneously relevant information or knowledge for various reasons. The main reason is their ad-based business model, pushing first the clients’ ads. Another reason is the multiplicity of similar data and information stored in various files, applications, robots, IoT, etc.

The business model of the most of these search engines goal is not necessary finding, but transforming us into a machine to buy. The “assistants” search engine offers follow the same business rules. By consequence instead of obtaining the relevant information, these devices provide first the information about their clients that pay for the ads. Most of these assistants are not able of automatic recognition of what spoken language is used.

For all these reasons, we need effective tools for accelerating innovation.

Inspired by the by the work of Entovation network (http://entovation.com/) on Knowledge City [20] and then on Knowledge Cities, Knowledge Regions and Knowledge World [21] the Global Knowledge Society should be considered as a whole with holistic perspective and as ecosystems. During the network meeting in Helsinki 2003, the concept of En2polis [20] was born. During the next open meeting in Monterey, Mexico, this concept was extended to regions and world. Implemented latter still as concept and knowledge service [22] this movement groups representative of over 20 cities. The related association proposes annual conferences; however they do not use any platform for knowledge sharing.

Inspired by En2polis, a Platform for Knowledge society was adapted to Union for the Mediterranean (https://ufmsecretariat.org/) and presented during Global Forum 2009, Bucharest [23]. The Fig. 4 presents the system components of this platform.

Fig. 4.
figure 4

Platform for Global Knowledge Society Ecosystems.

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It is composed of living knowledge cultivators and artificial knowledge discovery engines both influencing and preserving the environments they are a part. All platform components are connected and interact with each other. Powered by artificial intelligence and having the ability to learn, the machines (computers, smartphones, robots, etc.) would become the intelligent assistants of humans.

An ecosystem connecting users of all levels, designers of machines, software editors and researchers fueled by challenges, needs, feedback and mutual discovery of problems to be solved and technological possibilities.

The architecture of this platform is dynamic and incremental allowing adding modules that articulate with each other through reusable conceptual knowledge models [16]. The adequate AI techniques as well as reasoning models offer a variety of efficient services including relevant search.

An appropriate education is still one of sine qua non conditions of a sustainable society. Innovative education at all levels, 3 W (what you want, when you want, where you want), e- and m-learning, without “walls” and borders between domains, focus on effective learning, asking right questions, connecting with right people, including the ability to apply the acquired knowledge in given situations.

Educational system includes an early detection of talents, offer measuring another IQ (imagination quotient) and various way of teaching (by playing) of global, holistic and system thinking. Such an education has the ambitious task of changing mentalities and values, of educating a culture of “knowledge cultivators’, increasing imagination and creativity and taking the best from the past and inspiration from nature.

This education is based on exchanges, where we learn also to break usual connections (mental flexibility), to listen and respect, to undertake and succeed collectively; an education for all, in which technology and means of communication have a significant role to play.

Such a real time learning switches from diffusion and absorption only to listening, observing, participating, capturing, linking and opportunity hunting.

The other important points are the official recognition of new forms of organizations such as networked enterprise [4, 17] and selection of employees based on talents and not on social position.

The innovation process and in particular products design and packaging methods needs to be more nature inspired (biomimetics) [10] and produce sustainable products with embedded knowledge, which will be also used for repairing instead of recycling.

Computers and other devices must become “green”, equipped with “green and intuitive software. Data center needs also optimization and adopting of circular energy principle [30].

Knowledge tours, as well as virtual and real, helps acquiring new knowledge, get a comprehension of cultural context, discovering alternative solutions or another ways of doing things and find ideas for new products and services.

Future Centers introduced by Leif Edvinsson [10] are among the places for prototyping new forms of innovation such as such as new ways of managing intellectual capital or societal innovation. However very innovative, Future Centers lack of technological platform supporting the exchanges among the members.

The European Open Innovation Strategy and Policy Group (OISPG) work in close collaboration with the European Commission. Their philosophy embraces the Open Innovation 2.0 paradigm: creation of open innovation ecosystems where the serendipity process is fully-fledged. “We believe that involving citizens directly in the innovation process allows rapid prototyping in real life. Building a prototype is the fastest, most effective way to push an idea forward. Prototyping will foster entrepreneurship in Europe, will create jobs and will boost sustainable economic and societal growth… The base our thinking on Quadruple Helix Innovation Model where government, industry, academia and civil participants work together to co-create the future and drive structural changes far beyond the scope of what any one organization or person could do alone” [31].

Except meetings, annual Yearbook [6] website [31] and group on social network they do not have a platform to accelerate innovation, share experiences and providing relevant and immediate access to their collaborative knowledge.

Our proposal of platform for them in shown in Fig. 5.

Fig. 5.
figure 5

Elements of platform for OISPG

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4 Conclusion and Perspective

While there are many initiatives around the world on separate components of Innovation Ecosystems it will be interesting to connect them through a common platform to avoid loss of time and of energy doing similar or the same things using various lens. More collaboration on the global level may help addressing the urgent current challenges. Nevertheless, such collaboration needs an effective platform built on Knowledge Innovation principles and powered by the adequate technology.

Innovation ecosystems require organizing and optimizing knowledge for quick and relevant access. It can be done using knowledge models and combining intuitive interfaces, big data, machine learning and knowledge processing.

Overall strategy and policies should be dynamic, integrate feedback from prototyping and practice to evolve. Evaluation of impacts at the early stage of the innovation process aims in avoiding at least productivity paradox and pollution.

The future work will focus on prototyping of such a platform with incremental approach and considering environmental impact.

We also target innovation inspired by nature and centered on humans; taking advantages from past knowledge and experiences, able to make us dream, smile and live in peace, respecting each other and building a sustainable future together.