Dealing with the not yet known as a leverage for innovative policy making: the case of a regional ICT program

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Dealing with the not yet known as a leverage for
innovative policy making the case of a regional
ICT program

• Sylvie Occelli  
• IRES - Istituto di Ricerche Economico Sociali del
  Piemonte, Via Nizza 18, 10125 Turin, Italy,
  tel.[phone], e-mail occelli_at_ires.piemonte
  .it

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Premises

• There is a sense of incapacitated ability to act
  . This is determined by a tension between the
  unexpected or unintelligibility traits of many
  situations and an unconcerned, unaware and
  careless attitude on the part of the observer
• This is evident in today policy on innovation
  (see the acknowledgement of ontological
  uncertainties for identifying the attributions of
  new system functionalities)

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Contents

• Outline of a conceptual model of (ICT based)
  innovation
• Implications of that model as far ICT policies in
  Piedmont
• The latest ICT regional program which seems to
  have taken up the challenge

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Elements of the conceptual model 1Challenging
features of Information Communication Technologies

• the hard component, which is the tangible part of
  the innovation, i.e. a type of commodity, a
  technological artefact, an idea, a behaviour
• the soft component, a bundle of intangible
  aspects related to its operation, which enable
  the creation of knowledge potentials for both the
  users, i.e. novel possibilities for agents to
  learn about their surrounding world and the
  organizations users belong to, i.e. new roles and
  functionalities for firms, institution, cities
  and regions.

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Elements of the conceptual model 2 The
innovation kernel
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Innovation underlies the evolution of human
organizations

• It is searched for in spite of its costly
  investments
• Positive expectations about new functionalities
  are recognized as major drives of this search

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How innovation comes about
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STAGES OF ICT IMPACTS PRODUCED BY ICT

• a) Substitution replacements of existing
  functions in order to improve efficiency
• b) Co-evolution as a result of ICT spreading,
  virtual action spaces would occur together with
  physical counterparts in socio-economic and
  spatial organization
• c) Recombination a further relational dimension
  would add up to the already existing social,
  economic, spatial and institutional ones

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Views of innovation and perspectives on the
relationships between ICTs and regional systems
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Challenging questions for regional ICT policies

• a) how to gain as much advantages as possible
  from the deployment of the different perspectives
• b) how to proceed most effectively along the
  different stages in order to favour the different
  regional sub areas
• .Indeterminacy of the ICT spreading.

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How that indeterminacy affected the ICT policies
in Piedmont in the nineties

• It called for more articulated development
  programs in order to better anchor ICT positive
  effects onto local areas
• It made apparent that faltering policy-making was
  caused not only by the difficulties to identify
  value-laden future development scenarios worth
  being socially shared but by the difficulties to
  find in the existing context the institutional
  and operational scaffolding structures allowing
  for the policy actions to be successfully
  accomplished

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The strategic projects of the Piedmont ICT Policy
Program (WI -PIE)
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The activities of the observatory as drivers of a
learning process about the relationships between
ICT and regional development
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The structure of the observatory
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From a scaffolding structure to an appreciative
setting

• An appreciative setting is a human based process
  intended to provide an epistemology for making
  sense of social processes. Relevant traits of
  such a setting are knowledge openness,
  self-creation and responsibility
• Facilitating the formation of an appreciative
  setting is a challenging issue for the
  development of the observatory activities