Jari Kaivo-oja’s April blog entry on the economical growth paradigm and the new models of systematic innovation sparked heated discussion. The blog entry summarised recent discussion by emphasising the future importance of immaterial business capital, such as professional and skilled staff, research and development, patents, trademarks, software, customer relations, business models, organisation structures and design expertise. Jari Kaivo-oja stressed the importance of focusing on skilled staff and investments in immaterial capital, while also considering the change in innovation work that is becoming more and more internationally distributed and less national.
The active discussion on the blog entry criticised the need for constant growth (instead of even considering degrowth as an alternative) and went on to debate the different growth models and the quality of growth. The discussion moved on to the very definition of innovation, and the entire process from an idea to invention to innovation. The blog entry clearly struck a nerve – the discussion on Western growth models and the importance of immaterial capital is clearly a sensitive topic.
Another theme for April was open data. In his blog entry, Kari A. Hintikka presented the Public data – introduction to opening up information sources (available in Finnish, PDF) publication. Following the example from the US and the UK, the publication provides guidance and best practices for opening up different public administration data sources. The data could be used for various purposes: creating new business opportunities, civic activities and improving the public administration, for example. Various official departments and institutions in Finland are opening up their data while commercial actors may soon follow suit. The first applications and business concepts making use of open data are slowly emerging.
