Basque science, technology and innovation policy has had an obsession with typifying its innovation system and cataloging its agents and the different plans have been doing so (the PCTI 2015is no exception), describing functions and subsystems and assigning the different institutions and existing public-private organizations to them. From a Cartesian point of view of reality, this may be useful and may serve as an illustrative element of the context. However, it does little to understand what makes a society innovative, or what are the factors that explain the innovative processes that take place in it.
What is really critical is not the agents, but the diversity, multiplicity and richness of the relationships that are generated between them. For this reason, we have to move towards a new paradigm that is better explained as an “eco-system” that better conveys the necessity and virtue of interdependence relationships for the strength of the whole. In terms of innovation, companies add more value when they collaborate; when more than “compete” they “compete” among themselves with shared medium and long-term objectives. The same with technology and research centers whose contribution is very limited when they lock themselves in their “ivory tower”. Their innovation potential is truly unfolded when they are ready to understand the real problems that companies and institutions face worldwide and build and articulate capacities with other agents to transfer knowledge and add value.
Innovation also implies openness and globality. Relations between agents are not produced by proximity, but by the real contribution of value; Companies, like all kinds of agents, look for the best partners for their innovation projects regardless of their location and, therefore, we need an integrated system connected to the best ones to make innovation flourish in companies and institutions, creating specific and own advantages. that are maintained over time and give it personality, compared to other territorial realities: a “global ecosystem” of innovation in the Basque Country, built on the basis of its own identity capable of projecting itself in the European Space, as opposed to the idea of a system turned in on itself and often enclosed within its borders.
An identity that undoubtedly goes through the industry in which the Basque Country brings tradition and world-class capabilities and in which it is capable of integrating operators, manufacturers of equipment, systems and machinery, specialists in materials and a wide range of services specialized in technology, design, creativity and innovation to make the necessary leap towards advanced and knowledge-intensive manufacturing