Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SONNETS (SOcietal Needs aNalysis and Emerging Technologies in the public Sector)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2016-03-01 al 2017-08-31
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
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.