Integrated management of innovation in university-driven open ecosystems. An evolutionary approach

Resumen

Public universities in Europe currently face a series of major challenges that jeopardize their position as strategic knowledge providers. New technologies are one of these great challenges, since their effects can be seen in other traditional sectors such as banking or retail. However, it is also precisely the new technologies that enable new opportunities for the change of universities, allowing them to evolve towards new models more adapted to the new times, and where innovation is presented not only as a tool for their survival, but as a source of new competitive advantages and new opportunities for collaboration. This research study presents a new framework of action for the evolution of universities, taking advantage of each of the major challenges identified as new opportunities for transformation towards integrated systems of innovation management, research and education. With this fundamental objective, two approaches are presented, one more incremental and the other more evolutionary, which facilitate the process of university change. The main contributions of this research work confirm the need for a change of the current model used by public universities, contributing in a very positive way to generating the necessary debate that must take place for their awareness and action. It also shows the relationship and importance of knowledge and its management both in the decision-making process and in the innovation process. With this objective, different techniques and tools are shown, some generated within this work, that allow a quantitative analysis of the innovation ecosystems of university type, with which it is possible to conduct not only the monitoring and analysis of the ecosystem, an exponential increase of useful information for decision making, but also to know the behavior of its different actors, improving the acting capacity for the benefit of these actors and the ecosystem itself. Finally, one of the main contributions of this work is the new lines of research and work that are opened, both from the point of view of integrated systems of innovation management, to the very clarification of the innovation process.