The Innovation Union and EIT

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apparatus in European energy research thus comprise first and foremost expertise institutions within energy technology research – in most cases well-established energy research institutions with a long track record as dominant energy research actors in their respective national contexts as well as on a European level.

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The SEEIT partnership was formed in 2009 as a consortium proposing a set-up for a Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC) under the newly established European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). EIT was constructed as an initiative

“outside” the established DG structure in the EU Commission with its own headquarters in Budapest. While EIT is seen as an integral part of the overall European

“Innovation Union” framework, EIT is defined as more autonomous with regard to defining the means whereby it contributes to the strategic objectives in the EU frameworks for innovation and research (EU COM 2011c: 6). The main purpose of the EIT is to select and support a number of KICs. The first round of KIC calls was in 2009 in the fields of energy, climate and information and communication technology.

SEEIT was formed in response to the energy call.

In the EU innovation policy landscape, EIT is seen as a key platform for improving innovation and entrepreneurship in Europe through the formation of strategic collaborations between universities, research laboratories and firms. The KICs target

“grand societal challenges” (EU COM 2009, 2011a) where long-term strategic alliances are seen as a key part of the organizational solution to delivering results. This means that the KICs target areas characterized by high systemic complexity such as the energy sector, healthcare, agriculture, information and communication technology, climate and transportation in line with the overall EU “Innovation Union” policy framework (EU COM 2010a).

Compared to the energy research agenda-setting apparatus introduced above, the EU innovation frameworks including the EIT institution is a different story. Where the SET plan and the various actor formations in energy research related hereto has a strong focus on energy technology research and gathers the European energy elite, the innovation agenda apparatus is far more inclusive in its scope cutting across all aspects

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of the economy conceived to be of importance to innovation and knowledge-based economies. Ontologically speaking, the energy elite agenda apparatus builds on and continues to invest strongly in an energy technology-centered reality where institutions and actor constellations have stabilized around energy technology research and policy for many decades. This ontology is absent in the innovation frameworks. Rather, a characteristic of the innovation frameworks, including the EIT is a lack of a “hard core ontology” of any kind. As illustrated in the above 2007-quote framing the EIT initiative, the KICs are seen as testbeds for an open-ended set of issues related to innovation and entrepreneurship. One can already begin to imagine the clashes this opens up for in the formation of SEEIT where exactly these two agenda setting apparatuses play a formative role with the EIT provided an open-ended, “blank spot”

in its call for KIC proposals, and the majority of the SEEIT partners deeply involved in the SET plan process.

The initiation of SEEIT as a partnership responding to the EIT call for Knowledge and Innovation Communities was therefore not a situation where the partners could use familiar ways of crafting research proposals, defining problems to be solved and prescribing the proper method to deal with problems identified. In a cartographic understanding of this, SEEIT could not rely on known ways of drawing maps connecting problems to research methods and organization. This cartographic instability was reinforced by a very open-ended call made the EIT. The call was clearly constructed in an open-ended way with regard to defining how the “new modes of collaboration for innovation” could be set up. This strengthens the cartographic nature of SEEIT’s initiation – not only did it rest on a critique within the field itself of insufficient collaboration, it also responded to a call for new collaboration solutions that left open the question of how an affirmative, new approach would look like. This

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was up to the KIC proposing partnerships to ‘solve’ – the map had to be constructed by the KIC proposing consortium.

The SET plan along with the launch of the EIT with its focus on innovation-centered collaboration thus played a formative role for SEEIT and I shall therefore get back to this in subsequent chapters. For now, it suffices to point out that SEEIT was initiated in context of European policies in relation to innovation and energy systems transition – policies where coordination through converging multiple strategic horizons is a key aspect of the overall approach. These strategic horizons and their organizing effect on the present, is a central aspect of how SEEIT took shape in its initiation and subsequent pursuit of rendering the partnership productive. We could say that SEEIT – seen from the point of view of European policy tendencies – is part of a wider build-up of a strategic, anticipative capacity in relation to organizing and creating momentum in complex system transition processes – not only in the field of energy, but also in other areas of central importance to future growth and welfare (Højgaard et al 2012a, 2012b). With the SET plan framework, the energy area, compared with other “grand challenges”, demonstrate a particularly strong orientation towards developing such anticipative structures and processes making this area a good case for studying ongoing efforts to organize systemic innovation. In the following, I will provide a brief outline of the SEEIT partnership process, its composition and activities so that we have a clear sense of what the partnership is about.