Monthly Archives: July 2017

Introducing the Industry Commons

Since I wrote ‘7 ingredients to build a successful innovation ecosystem’ we have scaled our methodology to become what we now call the Industry Commons. In this video I address the theory behind it, and the challenge of constructing new kinds of mental models for the physical internet.

The development of the Industry Commons is the logical consequence of the original project’s impacts. By the time we rolled out our Market Testbed our project had hit 5.5 million impacts on social media, one of our startup teams had already filed a patent for heavy industry, agriculture and forestry; one hit the Forbes ‘top entrepreneur’ list; another received €1 million in follow-up funding; and partner institutions had several papers and book chapters accepted for publication as byproducts of the process. Industry had donated IP to our toolkit and some of the first transversal applications were created – and ported across to other industry verticals. Our methodologies were translated into high level innovation recommendations for the European Commission’s future research and innovation programme.

Since then, through the Industry Commons, we developed a way to safely bolt disruptive innovation on top of existing industry capabilities. 13th June 2017 saw the official launch of this idea with a keynote at the European Commission Open Innovation 2.0 conference and Industry Commons has since been adopted as a key recommendation for the future of European open innovation policy.

The above speech was delivered as part of the Worldwide IoT Day, to a Rotterdam meetup focused on Art and Imagination in IoT, on 9 April 2017.