On the battle fields of Europe some centuries ago, Napoleon had a problem: how could he feed his troops when the countries he was invading were not able or inclined to provide food? The French military leader believed in the power of inducement prizes to incentivise innovation. In 1810 he offered a reward of 12,000 francs to François Appert for his preserving food innovation that revolutionised the can food process and solved the problem of food scarcity in the battlefield. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in challenge prizes across the private, public and third sectors. This consortium of Nesta, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and Burson Marsteller will use the full extent of the partnership’s innovation, prize design and research expertise and European networks to conduct an in depth research with a focus on need and potential for breakthrough innovation, in order to design 8-12 inducement prizes in key ICT thematic areas to solve societal challenges affecting European communities. We will carry out rigorous analysis of the market amenabilities by combining desk research and expert interviews to identify key ICT thematic areas of technological and societal challenges that potential inducement prizes will solve. We will then deliver a series of expert workshops to validate the research findings. With our inducement prizes’ expertise, we will effectively use the research to design the inducement prizes and inform the most appropriate size of associated funds for each prize. This will include modelling of the inducement prize concepts, definition of success criteria and draft of prize competition rules, underpinned by plans for evaluations, operations and dissemination. Alongside the research and design activities we will draw on our presence across Europe to draft an effective communication strategy to guarantee that inducement prizes will be well received by a broad community of traditional and non-traditional innovators and potential investors.

The European Digital Forum (EDF) is a think tank led by the Lisbon Council and Nesta (secretariat). It was first proposed in the Startup Manifesto and later launched by European Commission Vice-President Kroes at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2014. Its founding partners are European Investment Fund, Telefonica, BBVA and Orange. They provided seed funding to get the EDF off the ground but the financial resources are insufficient to execute the ambitious work programme envisioned by the secretariat. The objectives of the EDF Thought Leadership and Policy Network Exchange (EDFx) are: 1) To scale up existing activities of the EDF, enabling greater policy impact and geographical reach 2) To pursue independent research aimed at highlighting ways to measure and improve the framework conditions for web entrepreneurs 3) To facilitate a deeper, more sustained exchange between the web community and policymakers, thereby informing and shaping public policy The objectives will be achieved through high-level policy summits and fringe events at established tech fora; the development of a one-of-its-kind indicator to measure the quality of the startup ecosystem and a repository of best practices, as well as a hard-hitting communication and community-building strategy, including policy support and monitoring actions. EDFx will operate at the intersection of web entrepreneurship (i.e. founders, investors) and public policy (i.e. politicians, civil servants), exploiting synergies between the two groups and engaging them in a future-oriented exchange. This dialogue will be placed squarely in a broader policy setting - underlining the significance of web entrepreneurship to innovation performance, growth and job creation - and will be underpinned by a dynamic, world-class research and outreach programme. The fact that EDFx will build on a successful project that is already underway will allow it to “hit the ground running” to achieve speedy impact and results.

No other technology has been able to radically reshape and permeate the very fabrics of our societies as rapidly and fundamentally as the internet has. But the increased concentration of power on the internet in the hands of just a few ever more dominant players makes that few now reap the true benefits of the digital economy; the growing complexity and opacity of the processes and technologies that govern it makes challenging this status quo exceedingly difficult. Serious interventions are needed to make the next generation internet inclusive, resilient and competitive again. By intervening in the development process of emerging technologies, we are able to steer the process of innovation in a human-centric and ethical direction and allow European businesses and civil society organisations to play a leading and pioneering role in their development. But to help direct and shape the future internet, we need to know which technologies will underpin it. To identify the technologies that will likely be game changers for the internet in 2025, we use cutting edge big data methodologies and novel web-scraped data sources to capture early signals about technologies and research topics, and develop a rigorous process for evaluating whether a technology will positively contribute to the development of a more desirable internet. The EU Engineroom project approach is centred around the articulation of an ambitious and concrete vision for the future internet, and the development of a methodology for identifying those technologies and research topics that will underpin that vision of a more inclusive, resilient and competitive internet by 2025. This methodology will form a key pillar for future phases of the NGI initiative as an easily-reproducible and comprehensive tool for continuously identifying and evaluating emerging technologies and trends, and helps establish the NGI as a key new flagship programme for internet research beyond Horizon2020.

The DSI4EU project will support, grow and scale the current Digital Social Innovation network of projects and organisations, bringing together social entrepreneurs, hackers, communities and academics working on key DSI fields such as the makers movement, the collaborative economy, open democracy and digital rights. DSI4EU will foster digital innovations for the social good, helping communities share data, collaborate to solve societal problems and scale their initiatives focusing on open and distributed technologies and new sustainable business models. DSI4EU will develop and upgrade the digitalsocial.eu platform, to promote large-scale collaboration and support experiments among the DSI community and activate collective awareness with a large number of citizens across Europe. DSI4EU will also provide an engaging programme of training, mentoring, events, policy workshops and experimentation. DSI4EU will represent the building blocks for a new participatory innovation model for Europe, a more decentralised web and an inclusive and sustainable society, including a radical approach to scaling, extending and connecting th DSI network in Europe.

Big data and data analytics offer significant opportunities to transform Research and Innovation (R&I) policy with a new generation of more relevant, inclusive and timely indicators than those already available, potentially enabling better decisions with bigger (and better measured) impacts. However, concerns about the representativity, accuracy and interpretability of new data sources and methods is slowing down their acceptance. EURITO brings together a unique consortium of organisations with strong capabilities in R&I policy, big data analytics, machine learning and data visualisation with the goal of taking new data sources and methods from the periphery of R&I policy to its core. To achieve this, we will adopt a work process inspired by the findings of a DG RTD funded project on Data Mining for Research and Innovation Policy that Nesta was involved with as a technical expert. We will start with a scoping stage where we engage with policy and data stakeholders to discover R&I policy user needs, then turn those needs into agile R&I analytics data pilots in a exploratory stage. We will scale-up the most promising pilots to generate next generation, relevant, inclusive, timely and open R&I indicators, which we will then validate rigorously, and communicate using interactive visualisation tools that support decision-making, encourage further exploration of the data, and open it up to wider audiences, making R&I policy-making processes more transparent and democratic. The potential impacts of EURITO include better informed and targeted R&I policies, new opportunities for innovation that build on the open data, open code and open knowledge developed throughout the project, an enhanced understanding of innovation systems, and new opportunities for information sharing and collaboration between policymakers, researchers and data businesses.