NS's communities face major challenges in the coming decades and innovations are essential in fulfilling them. Innovation policy, nowadays comprehensively expressed as "mission-oriented, multilevel innovation governance", is focused on sustainable/inclusive transitions. In the innovation literature, governance models are mainly based on fundamental R&D & high-tech clusters.
Instead, the Grand Societal Challenges (GSCs)/SDGs require easy-to-apply bottom-up governance models for strategic innovation action planning, with a leading role for skilled local/regional government “transitioners”. Therefore, FREIIA's objective is to create skills, resources, competences, capabilities & structures that support the public sector in becoming effective and successful in transformative policies & in building resilience, with a focus on the GSCs/ SDGs.
To this end, FREIIA develops a necessary, design thinking-based & practice-oriented governance framework, that takes into account the need for easy application & fast diffusion: the Governance Innovation Intervention Learning Model. NS islands, each uniquely positioned, have demonstrated to act as special places for “spark type innovations" that offer great potential for the mainland, thereby providing a fruitful basis for the development of such a model.
The model comprises two engines: the TIPPING mechanism (WP1) and the "Rudder method" (WP2). These engines will be (further) developed in a bottom-up participatory approach in which community involvement is central and young entrepreneurs, students and tourists (WPs 3&4) shall enrich the process.
We aim to achieve synergy in the four areas of:
- Shaping a bottom-up approach within the context of top-down EU's GSCs;
- Connecting governement's different levels (multi-level governance);
- Connecting the Quintuple Helix's different actors (multi-actor); and
- Learning from perspectives in NS countries by taking advantage of the diversity of approaches and incorporating cultural differences.
