Foreword

Organisations around the world are faced with a series of complex and interconnected developments, ranging from environmental tipping points to security threats and accelerated technological shifts. Governments are struggling to make sense of this reality and respond in an adequate way, not just to tackle crises, but also to identify future opportunities. Anticipating change and harnessing it for innovation is a promising approach to successfully navigate an uncertain world and survive in global competition. But no single institution can do this alone. A range of perspectives and expertise are needed to tackle the kinds of challenges societies face today and will confront in the future.

Governments need to build capacity for effective collaboration across sectors, bridging organisations and expertise to harness collective intelligence. This means being able to put in place and effectively manage partnerships today that can respond to change tomorrow. These partnerships among governments, research organisations, private sector organisations and civil society can help develop collective solutions before windows of opportunity are lost or crises hit. With a dedicated focus on anticipation, this diversity of actors can develop a collective understanding of the possible futures ahead, navigate uncertainty and help governments make better decisions in the present.

This report offers an approach for governments to systematically design and develop anticipatory innovation ecosystems. Governments need a dedicated governance capacity to manage these ecosystems and harness bottom-up anticipatory insights for the benefit of policy making. The OECD has been working with Latvia to examine how the country’s governance processes and mechanisms need to be transformed to enable ecosystem innovation across key sectors in a systematic manner. The work has identified processes to improve and integrate governance at the policy (meso) and ecosystem (micro) levels, so that insights generated by ecosystems can be fed upstream into policy decisions and ecosystem development can be steered in a strategic way. This fosters an environment suitable for innovation which draws on local and network-dependent strengths while keeping abreast of potential future developments.

The insights contained in this report were gathered through on- and offline workshops and interviews with over 80 ecosystem stakeholders in Latvia, as well as desk research and interviews to identify good practice for anticipation and innovation ecosystem governance globally. The report can be used to enhance innovation in key sectors for Latvia including: knowledge-intensive bioeconomy; biomedicine, medical technologies, bio-pharmacy and biotechnologies; smart materials, technologies and engineering systems, smart energetics; and information and communication technologies (ICT).

Investing in the governance of anticipatory innovation ecosystems is important for tackling the great missions of our time, ranging from sustainability to societal challenges such as demographic change. It is a model that can be applied across sectors to create capacity and improve strategic thinking through collaboration. Latvia is in a privileged position to spearhead this work: the country is faced with innovation challenges that affect small economies and needs to pre-empt and adjust to external developments in a way that makes the best use of its agile economic landscape. With the help of anticipatory innovation ecosystems, Latvia can identify future opportunities in a systematic manner and connect them to existing capacity across organisations. This work can be an example for governments around the world looking for more effective ways to thrive in an uncertain environment.