One Page Summary

How can we change the current situation of an impressive number of young talents leaving their home town to get better learning and working opportunity? How can we increase the competitiveness of local SMEs and how can we generate more confident safe room of collaboration for them? How can we improve the local ecosystem getting all existing actors involved in a common programme which clearly generate benefits to all target groups? How can we increase the confident of the local actors in opening their doors and work with local young talents? How can we help Innesta in adopting innovative actions & solutions able to stimulate the local community? How can we make Messina an excellence of Innovation and reference point for national and international players?
InnoStrait aims to propose concrete solutions and initiative able to reduce the brain drain of the young talents raising their technical and business competences and experience and to increase the level of competitiveness of the local business ecosystem offering the local company and public actors’ tools and programme easy to test and adopt. The company or public sectors will present, via open call, cases and “problems” associated to them. The young talents will answer to the call proposing solutions for the problems. InnoStrait will support the matchmaking between the talents and the company and will offer complementary workshops and lectures to improve the competences of the people involved (employee and young talents) and their skills. On top of that, InnoStrait & Innesta will build an ecosystem of local actors willing to collaborate to the OI Programme (proposing mentors, giving lectures and offering prices for the young talents) with the final scope to make the InnoStrait model sustainable and available also after the end of the pilot.
The Open Innovation approach has been tested in the past 10+ years in several sectors addressing different target groups. The originally concept, introduced by Henry Chesbrough, focuses on company and corporate while in the last years several studies and examples analyzed the use of OI models in order to change the mindset of SMEs, Start-up, research Center and Public Authority (PA). In simple words, a company (or technically defined seeker) should be able to identify its problem and to start a process of Innovation which does not limit the proposition of solution by internal sources (such as R&D department or management) but open the doors to external providers (defined solvers) able to propose “out of the box” and “innovative" solutions. The solvers could be other company, start-ups, research center other simply citizen (e.g. young talents). Nowadays several OI initiatives have been established in USA and Europe with different scope and principles. InnoStrait brings to the Strait of Messina a personalized OI programme with the scope to import actions and initiatives which have been tested successfully in other countries. One example is given by DEMOLA Network a strongly international network of OI Labs, which operates over 15 countries all over the world and brings together mentors from all business sectors and more than 700.000 students. Starting from this and other examples, InnoStrait develops and adopts an Open Innovation and learning model which fits to the needs of the Strait of Messina Area (including the City of Messina and Reggio Calabria, the city on the other side of the strait which is connected regularly via ferry-boat in 20 minutes time) and its actors (both seekers and solvers) and will test them in order to generate impact for sustainable solution.
The main scope is to analyze the area of action, identify the sector of reference and the actors to involve, pilot the OI and learning package (via the bootcamp & mentoring support), generate concrete results and benefits for the companies and the young talents, raise awareness, push the active involvement of the local community and build the ecosystem able to run the OI initiative after the end of InnoStrait.
To achieve this goal, some clear challenges needs to be addressed and solved. The main challenge is to introduce to a “traditional” ecosystem the concept of OI and its methodology. InnoStrait will address the main actors of the Strait of Messina area, will present the concept and possible scenario to test OI. To persuade them, example of success cases will be shared together with the chance to be one of the innovation leader of the Strait of Messina Area. At the moment no initiatives or project based on the Open Innovation paradigm are available in this area and InnoStrait aims to make a clear change and generate impact on the social and economic ecosystem letting cross-sectorial cooperation the habit and not the exception.