The European Institute of Innovation and Technology : How to Steer a Multi-Stakeholder Innovation Ecosystem

To tackle the European Union's innovation system weaknesses in the commercialization of the research results, in 2009 the European Commission (EC) has launched an open call for the creation of 2-3 Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs), the operative level of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). KICs are innovation ecosystems made of research organizations, firms and various stakeholders, which are expected to perform training, research and commercialization activities in innovative and integrated ways. This paper builds on a literature review and stakeholders' objectives analysis to propose a multi-level framework of Key Performance Indicators to steer such an ecosystem and handle the fundamental tension, typical of innovation networks, between unity and diversity. The core idea is that cooperative activities in the KIC will require the diverse inputs provided by the various partners to give rise to super-additional effects and generate several types of outcomes, which are not all equally valuable for each partner. In our conceptual model we show that focusing on partner-specific inputs and outputs will make public and private partners more willing to fully cooperate and exploit their complementarities. Therefore, we propose a set of activity- and stakeholder-specific KPIs to measure the intensity and effectiveness of the collaboration and the relative moderating factors. In the conclusions, we discuss the envisaged findings of the study and policy implications