European project aimed at exploiting the innovative potential of creative industry professionals in the industrial sector.

Innovation is one of the great challenged faced by businesses. Irrespectively of the sector in which they operate, organisations are looking for something unique to differentiate themselves from the competition and gain an advantage over them. 

They aim to put a new product or service onto the market, to develop a process, a way of managing business or working relationships, or an organisational model that puts the business in a pre-eminent position in comparison with others.  It is not enough to perfect what is already there or maximise efficiency and efficacy to increase competitiveness.

A novelty which changes the rules of the game in favour of the organisation must be produced.

One of the great challenges of business innovation is having access to valuable ideas. Ideas are the cornerstone of innovation. Without them, we could perhaps optimise or improve what already exists, but we could never innovate. It is a determining asset for a business, a scarce asset, difficult to find and control . . . Or is it?

As we already discussed in our article Diversity for Innovation, the innovation capacity of an organisation depends to a great extent on its people. It depends on the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes which individuals bring to bear when confronted with problems. They are intangibles which condition a person’s way of perceiving reality and how they take action, and, of course, the way they offer creative solutions when developing products and services, processes or business models. Therefore, the higher the number of people who participate in the innovation process, the greater chance there is of collecting a variety of responses. Where one person sees a limitation, someone else may detect an opportunity; the end of something could be transformed into a beginning and when it comes to taste, to each his own! A diversity of profiles favours the generation of valuable ideas which give rise to disruptive innovations. This is even more true when this diversity is made up of creative people, by individuals who have the ability to contribute original, valuable ideas, as Punset says “with the sweat of their brains”.

For innovation to take place, spaces and processes need to be set up that facilitate the exploitation of the knowledge, ideas and experiences of the organisations and people that have a relationship with a business.

As we have already outlined in our article Diversity for innovation, disruptive ideas and diversity go hand in hand.  And this link is strengthened when diversity brings together people with backgrounds that are not conditioned by the reality and the day-to-day life of the business.

It was Professor profesor Henry Chesbrough who first proposed an innovation model that went beyond the walls of the business. He called it Open Innovation (OI), and it is now one of the cornerstones of business development. The achievements of companies like Cisco, Xerox, GE, Honeywell, Lindt etc. thanks to OI are recurring examples in the research and literature on the topic.  However, as Professor Chesbrough notes, OI is not a strategy valid only for large corporations.  It is imperative for any organisation, irrespective of size or sector, as all of them need to innovate to compete in a constantly evolving environment.

CreO Curriculum and 4 training modules for VET teaching staff validated.

Before the end of 2019, the CreO project came to the end of one of its decisive phases: the drawing up of the curriculum and the knowledge that VET training cycle teaching staff on CCI-related courses need to acquire to help their students to prosper in the world of industry.  This knowledge was divided into 4 training modules: