The Azores archipelago is preparing a flagship innovation on oceanographic and climate change research, under the title AIR Centre: Azores International Research. According to Manuel Heitor, Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education of Portugal, this island initiative is aimed at “multilateral cooperation in complex systems engineering and science towards an integrative approach to space, climate change and energy, earth and ocean science in the Atlantic, together with emerging methods of data science. The ultimate goal is to help building the future through an effective commitment to science and knowledge and North-South cooperation. Our commitment is to foster networks of opportunity to help future generations build a better future.
“Lessons learned over the last decades … have clearly shown that the future can only be built with more knowledge, more culture and more exchange of ideas. A new paradigm of structured international research relationships is emerging shaped by a new era of government and industry intervention in association with knowledge.”
Source: Manuel Heitor, 2016.
Example of strategy 4D:
Create and Demonstrate Flagship Innovations
In the TIPPING concept, it is a serious co-responsibility of island governments to help entrepreneurial agents create, probe and learn from, as well as communicate on local innovations. With this open- innovation model and innovation funnel in mind, the TIPPING approach proposes to consider policy makers and managers on islands as special, but serious and relevant co-designers and accelerators of potentially powerful regional innovations.
Particularly, for this argumentation, Mazzucato demonstrates that co- creation and long-term cooperation of governments and industry are needed particularly for those common-good innovations that otherwise never would have been addressed by industry alone (Mazzucato, 2018). By structurally helping in and around the innovation funnel, the chancesof local flagship innovation success definitely will be relatively higher and create a unique and competitive position. Once unique flagshipinnovations have been demonstrated on the island, local governments should also contribute to their promotion and export, including the use of soft and informal instruments.
