A new model of innovation distributed and based on the users themselves is emerging on a global scale. The Web 2.0 has shown us that innovation is not only found exclusively in universities, large companies or public research bodies. It also stems from the users themselves organized in social networks, wikis, blogs and social media. Innovation, too, works from the bottom up.
If innovation also comes from citizens, which new institutions and networks can spark it off? Is it the cities, where the contact between administrations and citizens is closer, pioneering bodies creating these new areas? GAT role can other institutions like museums, NGO’s, unions, small and medium companies, training-centres?
Different initiatives are moving in this direction in our country. On the one hand, we have our Living Labs, members of the European Network of Living Labs. On the other, the Social Spaces of innovation, regrouped in the platform eVIA, who go to great innovative effort in the fight against social exclusion and innovation in rural areas. The Secretariat of Telecommunications and Information Society, for its part, has been unveiling the programme for Knowledge Centres by way of the Spanish Plan for Advancement, another very significant move in this direction.
With the aim of getting to know each other and starting to work on-line, we suggest holding this first meeting of Spanish Knowledge Centres. The will to co-ordinate our efforts against the crisis encourages us. We call on all those institutions in agreement that citizens-at-large be at the epicentre of our new system of innovation.
