INSITE

Innovation, Sustainability, Technology

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 271574

Promoters
UNIVE: European Center for Living Technology (ECLT), Univ. Ca’ Foscari di Venezia CTHA: Complex Systems Group (CSG), Dept. of Energy and Environment (DEE), Chalmers Univ. of Technology Euclid Network (UK) CNRS: UMR Géographie-cités laboratory MUW: Section for Science of Complex Systems (SSCS), Center for Medical Statistics, Information and Intelligent Systems, Medizinische Universitaet Wien UA: Laboratory of Theoretical and Experimental Economics (LaTEx), Dept. of Economics (DEc), Universidad de Alicante UL: Institute of Geography (IGUL), Université de Lusanne UCCNUIC: Cork Constraint Computation Centre (4C), University College Cork (UCC), National University of Ireland THE HUB: The Hub Bruxel scrl TL: Tech4i2 Limited ARMINES: Laboratoires techniques, territoires et sociétés (LATTS), Association pour la Recherche et la Développement de Mèthodes et processus Industriels (ARMINES)

Keywords
Innovation Society | ICT | Social Innovation | Sustainability

Website
www.insiteproject.org

Context
The overriding imperative for our society is continued economic growth. The engine of this growth is innovation – the creation of new kinds of artifacts. But the increasing frequency and scale of environmental, social and economic crises urge us to pose the question: is the innovation society sustainable? How does the Innovation Society respond to these crises? Its ideology offers space for two kinds of response, one primarily economic and the other political. The economic response is via market driven innovation: the market responds to opportunities to remediate the adverse consequences that innovation cascades may generate. But it is becoming increasingly obvious that, despite its undeniable creativity in generating novelty, the market is not quick in detecting the negative consequences of innovation cascades, nor is it efficient in responding to them when it does detect them.
It seems as though Western society’s innovation processes and its dependence on them lie at the root of the sustainability crises. To address this, we will need new types of processes for innovation.
For EU to become leader in the promotion of sustainable development (see, more recently, also H2020 objectives), the vision of INSITE project as a Coordination Action, has been that of fostering the interaction and collaboration among civil society organizations and scientists from diverse fields. From some of the partners of this first project, emerged a research project “Emergence by Design” aimed at developing new theories of innovation and action, as well as new research practices and tools (also ICT), based on the conduction of some case studies.

Concept
Both the projects (see Emergence by Design) – coordinated by the European Centre for Living Technology, UNIVE – are intended to mobilize civil society to construct a socially sustainable future, by designing generative interactions and feedback loops between technical artifacts and social problems/narratives (to start through a coordination action and a research project). To move towards this vision, INSITE assumptions are that we need to bring people from different communities together to develop and promote a set of common ideas and strategies aiming towards a sustainable future, while MD’s are that we also need to design new processes, powered by new ICT solutions, informed by new theory. This summary requires a lot of un-packing. It also requires a codicil, which is the slogan of one of our practitioner consortium members: “Big ambitions, small steps.”

Activities
INSITE activities mainly consisted in workshops and meetings to share experiences, practices and approaches, so as to construct a common framework.

Development
INSITE is close to its end (31st May 2014)

Results
INSITE is close to the end, deliverables will be soon available.
Here is the INSITE Manifesto

Dissemination
INSITE: Newsletter, Googlegroups, Website, Facebook page, Twitter and videos.

Tools
In general the project has used/produced: Papers and conference presentations, Open space posters, Web-platform, Networks visualizations, videos, podcasts, etc.

INSITE used ICT tools and new media in general:
Website
Facebook
Twitter
Spreaker
Speaker Deck