Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SONNETS (SOcietal Needs aNalysis and Emerging Technologies in the public Sector)
Reporting period: 2016-03-01 to 2017-08-31
It is a fact that technology in our age is offering countless solutions that could change the way we live and act and that innovation is lately directly linked with emerging ICT technologies that are applied in various domains. However, despite the investments performed in the last decade the bitter truth is that “we are not there yet” when it comes to fully exploiting the benefits of ICT to help the public sector to meet emerging societal needs. Of course, enormous steps have been made towards automating processes and procedures, however it is difficult to deny that there is an urgent need for better, more efficient, effective and quality delivering public services. A need that will not only transform the public sector itself and cover the needs of public sector employees and policy makers, but that will also cater for citizens and businesses, thus benefiting all stakeholders and opening new innovation directions that will in turn accelerate the EU economy and will improve quality of life, powered by a renovated public sector that will be in the position to play a central and active role in innovation diffusion and technology take-up.
Although this need has been since long identified by all parties, there are numerous issues that have to be tackled in a well-defined and detailed manner towards streamlining the process of empowering the public sector in becoming a core innovation driver. These issues can be summarized under the following two questions: 1) how to identify, monitor and early detect societal trends that need to be met by specific public sector services? and 2)how to timely get aware of emerging technologies and assess their usability for the public sector?
The ability to provide convincing answers to the above questions leads to the creation of a thorough methodological framework for public administrations, resulting finally into a roadmap that will allow the public sector to grasp the role of the protagonist in a future of value added services. As such, SONNETS’s concept is based on the following major sub-concepts, which are all closely related:
• Needs Identification through evidence-based research approaches and methods
• Innovations Identification and Gap Analysis
• Impact generation through Community Building and Intense Networking
• Innovation Transfer through best practice identification in multidisciplinary areas and impact assessment
Although this need has been since long identified by all parties, there are numerous issues that have to be tackled in a well-defined and detailed manner towards streamlining the process of empowering the public sector in becoming a core innovation driver. These issues can be summarized under the following two questions: 1) how to identify, monitor and early detect societal trends that need to be met by specific public sector services? and 2)how to timely get aware of emerging technologies and assess their usability for the public sector?
The ability to provide convincing answers to the above questions leads to the creation of a thorough methodological framework for public administrations, resulting finally into a roadmap that will allow the public sector to grasp the role of the protagonist in a future of value added services. As such, SONNETS’s concept is based on the following major sub-concepts, which are all closely related:
• Needs Identification through evidence-based research approaches and methods
• Innovations Identification and Gap Analysis
• Impact generation through Community Building and Intense Networking
• Innovation Transfer through best practice identification in multidisciplinary areas and impact assessment
To start, a demand-driven approach was adopted in order to orient the process of reform at answering the needs expressed by SONNETS stakeholders (individuals, businesses, civil servants). In this step, the activities conducted are: Phase 1 (desk-based/secondary research) focused on carrying out a desk research for identifying needs as well as for highlighting societal and public sector trends and challenges. The subsequent phases (2 and 3) assisted our efforts at verifying the authenticity of the information collected through multiple sources. Finally, phase 4 was vital to further prioritize and contextualize needs and potential solutions. In terms of outputs, the work conducted generated 2 types of assets: a methodology for the implementation of a need-based and demand-driven innovation approach, and a snapshot of the current situation present in the four countries involved in terms of priorities and innovation requirements, which has be translated into a brochure with the list of the needs identified.
In order to fully exploit the benefits of ICTs to help the public sector meet emerging societal needs, SONNETS has designed the SONNETS Innovation Identification Framework that will accelerate the modernization of the public sector through the identification and analysis of emerging technologies that hold the potential to transform the public sector into a technology leader and innovation carrier, addressing, at the same time, the most pressing needs of the citizenship through 7 steps: (i) needs Identification, which comprises the first step described above; (ii) Technology Identification, in which a long list of technologies and trends was elicited from the initial pool of material. This list was refined through step (iii) Technology Pre-selection and Analysis; step (iv) Technology Assessment aimed at supporting the conduction of an adapted SWOT analysis, which targeted on the one side to assess the impact of the identified technologies and trends in the domains originally met, and to point out, on the other, opportunities for their adoption, usage and promotion by the public sector as well as potentially involved challenges and threats; in step (v) Innovation Potential Identification, the innovation potential of the technologies and trends identified in previous steps was assessed against two basic components: impact and feasibility; (vi) Scenario Building sets the scene for the application of the identified technologies and trends, and their respective solutions, into 2 hypothetical scenarios: the probable Public Sector (a gradually self-improving Public Sector building on the developments of today) and the desirable one (a revamped, semi-federated Public Sector, embracing Open Innovation) and, finally step (vii) Results Validation pursues the validation of the findings by coupling offline validation with online feedback.
To conclude, SONNETS highlighted the gaps between the identified societal and public sector needs and the identified technological opportunities by using the multi-criteria assessment tool ‘Weighted-Bit Assessment Table (WBAT)’ to create the ‘to-do list’ with all necessary activities to implement the ICTs successfully. Based on these results, SONNETS has produced a Roadmap that puts forward 23 research and innovation directions that should be followed in order to reach the anticipated vision of reshaping and reforming the public sector into a technology leader and a key player in tackling societal challenges. These recommendations can be classified into 3 types of briefs: policy brief to inform policy makers about the necessary research needs to transform the public sector in an efficient and citizen-friendly service of the future; research brief to inform researchers about the actual technological and socio-economic research needs of the end user and technology brief to inform representatives of the public sector about new emerging ICT technologies and how these could improve the efficiency, simplify the processes and services of their day-to-day work and also help to transform the public sector to be more open and citizen-friendly.
In order to fully exploit the benefits of ICTs to help the public sector meet emerging societal needs, SONNETS has designed the SONNETS Innovation Identification Framework that will accelerate the modernization of the public sector through the identification and analysis of emerging technologies that hold the potential to transform the public sector into a technology leader and innovation carrier, addressing, at the same time, the most pressing needs of the citizenship through 7 steps: (i) needs Identification, which comprises the first step described above; (ii) Technology Identification, in which a long list of technologies and trends was elicited from the initial pool of material. This list was refined through step (iii) Technology Pre-selection and Analysis; step (iv) Technology Assessment aimed at supporting the conduction of an adapted SWOT analysis, which targeted on the one side to assess the impact of the identified technologies and trends in the domains originally met, and to point out, on the other, opportunities for their adoption, usage and promotion by the public sector as well as potentially involved challenges and threats; in step (v) Innovation Potential Identification, the innovation potential of the technologies and trends identified in previous steps was assessed against two basic components: impact and feasibility; (vi) Scenario Building sets the scene for the application of the identified technologies and trends, and their respective solutions, into 2 hypothetical scenarios: the probable Public Sector (a gradually self-improving Public Sector building on the developments of today) and the desirable one (a revamped, semi-federated Public Sector, embracing Open Innovation) and, finally step (vii) Results Validation pursues the validation of the findings by coupling offline validation with online feedback.
To conclude, SONNETS highlighted the gaps between the identified societal and public sector needs and the identified technological opportunities by using the multi-criteria assessment tool ‘Weighted-Bit Assessment Table (WBAT)’ to create the ‘to-do list’ with all necessary activities to implement the ICTs successfully. Based on these results, SONNETS has produced a Roadmap that puts forward 23 research and innovation directions that should be followed in order to reach the anticipated vision of reshaping and reforming the public sector into a technology leader and a key player in tackling societal challenges. These recommendations can be classified into 3 types of briefs: policy brief to inform policy makers about the necessary research needs to transform the public sector in an efficient and citizen-friendly service of the future; research brief to inform researchers about the actual technological and socio-economic research needs of the end user and technology brief to inform representatives of the public sector about new emerging ICT technologies and how these could improve the efficiency, simplify the processes and services of their day-to-day work and also help to transform the public sector to be more open and citizen-friendly.
The overall outcomes of the SONNETS project are expected to have a positive impact on society as a whole, as the potential impact of SONNETS to the society can be expected as SONNETS is basing the transformation of the public sector on the needs of the society and the societal challenges in general, and has also the first bricks towards building a culture of collaboration and mutual benefits between the different stakeholders that deal with the Public Sector.