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More governments are realising the necessity of an innovation ecosystem. This chapter establishes the framework of an ecosystem of innovation, its relevance and four key dimensions — consciousness, capacity, co-creation and courage — as well as its main barriers and potentials for public sector innovation. The innovation ecosystem proposes an integrated way of looking at public organisations' innovation efforts that includes the key mutually dependent structures, processes and leadership roles that can drive or impede change within and beyond the public sector. Further, this chapter contends that building an innovation ecosystem across all its four dimensions greatly enhances its resilience: its capacity to tolerate the pressures and disturbances that will seek to diminish its stability and performance.

Firms can develop disruptive innovation by setting up an innovation cell that functions as a corporate innovation unit securing new technology and marketing insights that in cooperation with its business units could turn these technology and insights into commercial blockbusters. Innovation cells are to be located in leading engineering universities that strive for industrial liaison and technology transfer partnerships. The host university needs to create a specialized innovation ecosystem in which large firms and research laboratories coexist. The campus proximity fosters day-to-day interactions among different actors of the ecosystem, such as researchers, students, startups, venture capitalists, government entrepreneurial agencies, and other large companies. Innovation cells need to have a multidisciplinary team in which commercial–business development and technical–scientific experts work together to deliver market-ready prototypes and innovative business plans. These serve as evidence to the rest of the organization to support disruptive innovation product development.

This chapter reviews the core ideas behind Open Innovation, discusses what it is and is not, and shows how it can deliver more value to organizations and to society. Outside-in Open Innovation strengthens the current business and current business model, while inside-out Open Innovation searches for alternative businesses and business models. The chapter explores the connection between technology development and the business model, and examines the use of Open Innovation in intellectual property and in services. However, Open Innovation is not a panacea. Its boundary conditions and limitations must also be acknowledged. As with Chapter 1, the processes of generation in innovation must also be supported by equal attention to innovation dissemination and innovation absorption within the firm, in order for organizations to create and capture value from Open Innovation. Finally, Open Innovation is moving beyond collaborations between two actors, to a broader ecosystem focus that connects many actors together.

Across the globe, public leaders are demonstrating how a significantly more conscious and systematic approach to creating innovative solutions can effectively address some of society's most pressing societal challenges. The growing momentum of public sector innovation has evolved through awareness, cases and practice, barriers and practice. Innovation, like budgeting or human resource management, must become a natural discipline in government. Productivity imperative, growing citizen expectations, globalization, media, technology, demographic change, shocks and climate change are among the major driving forces that challenges public sector innovation. Unfortunately, most public sector organisations today are ill-suited to developing the kinds of radical new solutions that are needed. In order to make such ‘paradigmatic’ innovation much more likely, leaders in government must build an infrastructure of innovation — a public sector innovation ecosystem.

Open innovation and open business models are two concepts that have been launched by Henry Chesbrough (2003a; 2006a; 2007b). The chapter develops a classification scheme through the combination of open–closed innovation and traditional vs. open business models. Furthermore, the chapter considers new product development or new business development as just one specific driver for competitive advantage. Product innovations may not be an option for companies producing commodities but their competitive drivers may be affected by product innovations of their (technology) partners. Reframing open innovation in this way allows us to shed light on innovation networks in which the instigators of the network are for instance customers or complementors (but not the innovators themselves) are benefitting. This approach results in a general classification scheme for open innovation research. The simplicity of the structure should make it attractive as a starting point for new developments or application areas in the open innovation literature.

With limited resources and rapidly growing needs, public organisations must invest in activities that create the desired value for society. To that end, organisations must measure whether they contribute positively to that change. Why is there a need to measure? It's because there is a need to understand the value of one's work so people can improve upon it, and to be accountable, informing public policymaking and funding priorities. This chapter considers three distinct perspectives on measuring and learning in the context of public sector innovation: assessing the organisation's potential to innovate, learning from the individual innovation processes, and measuring the value of innovation. Further, to determine an organisation's total innovation potential is to analyse how it is faring on each of the four Cs, or dimensions of the innovation ecosystem.

Building an innovative culture is a key goal of most companies. An open approach to innovation has been shown to offer important advantages accelerating this goal. Current models of innovation ecosystems do not provide a clear roadmap to visualize the best manner of bringing together the right types of people to accelerate startup and new product success. The coral reef model was developed to conceptually organize community social structures necessary to improve idea-to-product development within the historical trend of open innovation. In a reef structure, participating companies and innovators access necessary technical wisdom and market insight while gaining access to capital more quickly. The chapter includes an analysis of the Austin Technology Incubator, which serves as an example to help define the activities of community structures such as incubators and accelerators that assist new enterprises in a competitive business marketplace within the open innovation framework.

Innovation leadership is played out in a force field between inspiration and execution. Inspiration thrives on openness, divergence, motivation and creativity. Execution thrives on traits such as structure, discipline, focus and stamina. For public managers, working in a different way, involving a wider scope of people, utilising deep qualitative knowledge, and running a more open, experimental and collaborative process, will require a significant measure of courage. The leadership role in innovation depends on the type of organisation and function. This chapter explores four distinct leadership roles that relate to different levels of government: the visionary (politician), the enabler (top executive), 360 degree innovator (mid-level manager) and knowledge engineer (institutional head). Each position of leadership holds distinctive characteristics that can help drive innovation across the first three dimensions of the innovation ecosystem: consciousness, capacity and co-creation.

This chapter integrates the conclusions of the different chapters into a coherent picture. The chapters outlined how open innovation research should evolve in their particular research area. The chapter integrate these ideas and crosslink them to each other, but it also focuses on topics that have not been covered and, in its opinion, still deserve more attention in the future.

This chapter introduces the term biotechnology and explains why it has been the subject of intense interest on the part of governments and investors around the world. It reviews the scientific advances, including the deciphering of DNA by Watson and Crick, which paved the way for the emergence of biotechnology, and describes the two key breakthroughs—recombinant DNA and monoclonal antibodies—which took place in the US and Britain in the 1970s. It draws some comparisons between biotechnology and semiconductors, noting the important role played in both sectors by newly formed entrepreneurial firms, and the dominance of the US. It also discusses the changing relationship between the new biotechnology firms and the established pharmaceutical companies.

Beginning with a review of the emergence of an internationally successful UK pharmaceutical industry in the post-war years, this chapter explores the polices employed by UK governments to support the biotech sector and describes similarities and differences in the approaches that successive UK governments have taken over the period 1980–2015. With the notable exception of the creation of Celltech, policy approaches under the Conservative governments which held office until 1997 focused on providing a supportive institutional environment for a broad range of industries—horizontal support, rather than vertical measures. In more recent years, as the biotech sector seemed to be at risk of decline, a more interventionist approach has been taken. The Conservative-Liberal coalition government (2010–15) adopted a more fully fledged industrial policy, with substantial vertical support measures for the sector in recent years. The chapter explores whether the government could have done more to support biotech firms.

This concluding chapter of the book summarises the evidence of prior chapters, showing why the US lead in biotechnology was difficult for the UK and other countries to follow. The US lead in recombinant DNA technology, is contrasted with the more difficult technical challenges faced by UK pioneers in monoclonal antibodies, and the subsequent focus of the UK sector on more established chemistry-based drug discovery approaches, rather than new biotechnologies. The head start the US has enjoyed, both in technology and institutional readiness, is further complemented by the huge scale in the US of federal support and investor support for high-tech firms. While the UK and other countries will continue to struggle to match these advantages, the development of more US-like institutions are expected to put the UK in a position where imitation of US-style biotech firms is now more realistic than in the past.