
What participants say needs to change to support Energy Innovation
It was an exciting challenge when the Province of Zuid-Holland asked the team at Concentra Anaytics Europe in mapping out its energy innovation ecosystem. But what recommendations would participants in the ecosystem make?
The theory is that innovation needs the right conditions: the interaction in a ‘triple helix’ model between universities, government, industry (both for-profit and not-for-profit) and with the addition of Finance.
Concentra interviewed more than 100 people from 80 organisations, mapping activity, networks and perceptions across the quadrants, and obtaining new insights into the evolution of the energy ecosystem. We were delighted to publish the final report and also to offer insights from the participants themselves at the launch event.
How do different stakeholders prioritise policy recommendations?
At the event, we fed back improvements suggested by the research participants to the whole crowd, and asked for their ratings to prioritise importance. With both the content and the results crowd-sourced from a group of around 65 experts, we expected some interesting insights. Here are the results:
The responses were slightly dominated by Finance and Business (53% together), with the remaining 47% roughly evenly balanced across the other 3 groups – Knowledge, Government and Not-for-Profit.
The overall results, showed that the top 10 recommendations to the group as a whole were:
There were some interesting differences between groups, shown in the group-by-group breakdown:
The OrgVue dashboard above provides quick insights into how different groups prioritise key policy recommendations for the Energy Innovation Ecosystem. Here are some insights:
- Businesses were much keener than other groups on getting more investment funds available.
- Government institutions were unusually interested in heating networks and getting more university / HBO / MBO collaboration.
- Universities longed to be more integrated into the business community – though no other groups thought this as important in improving the efficiency of the ecosystem.
- The group that got all its top-4 priorities into the top 4 on the overall list was: Not-for-Profit, perhaps reflecting its balanced position between government and business.
- Compared with very different corporate governance regimes in other countries, there was very little interest in revising the laws on bankruptcy.
- And the Schumpeterian desire for creative destruction ‘Actively break the old system to give space for a sustainable system’ was only really desired by the representatives of Smart Money – who were also most interested in Electricity Storage.
You can download the full report; and you can contact us for more information about replicating the study in your sector, country or region here.