Innovation Management in EOSC-hub

Roberta Piscitelli outlines the values and definitions of innovation management.    

What is innovation management?

Innovation management is the set of management activities to:

• Capture all the EOSC-hub project results
• Support the definition of the best protection approach for Intellectual Properties (IPs) produced in the project
• Maintain a dissemination and exploitation plan

Why is it important?

In order to achieve the expected impacts (benefits) of the project, we need to make sure that the EOSC-hub project results are used and accessible.

How do we manage innovation in EOSC-hub?

EOSC-hub has a dedicated task to define an innovation management plan with guidelines on how to collect information. In collaboration with the consortium, the task will maintain a catalogue of project results and will support the definition of the most appropriate exploitation routes. This will feed into the development of a dissemination and exploitation plan. The task receives input from EOSC-hub service strategy (WP2), and collaborates with the other work packages of the project for stakeholder engagement and implementing the dissemination and exploitation plan actions.

To engage partners in this work, on June 4^th and 5^th we organised a workshop for the work package leaders of EOSC-hub to introduce innovation management and it various elements. For the workshop, we received support by Dr. Eugene Sweeney, who has over 30 years experience of managing and commercialising research and new technologies and is an expert for the European Commission in the areas of IPR, ICT, Innovation, and Research-Industry partnerships.

The workshop, which lasted two half days, covered the following aspects:

• The initial definitions of innovation, IP, IPR, Dissemination, Communication and Exploitation
• How to manage the EOSC-hub project results and how to exploit them
• Which information needs to be collected within the project
• How to use this to create a plan for dissemination and exploitation
• Working groups on drafting a plan
• Feedback to project consortium

Within the working groups, the consortium started looking at the impacts and identified the key results of EOSC-hub. Each key results is an aggregation of the foreseen project results, with a clear focus on the benefits it addresses. The consortium will have further meetings to jointly define target users, IPRs for the foreground, and dissemination and exploitation strategies.

Roberta Piscitelli leads the EOSC-hub task 3.1: Innovation Management.