Essential of Management

Essential of Management CASE STUDY (20 Marks) Funded by the Creative Tampere Program, Demola is a Finnish open innovation platform for the creators of next generation products and services. Demola provides students and companies with a collaborative and multidisciplinary innovation environment where students from three regional universities create demonstrations of novel service and product concepts coming from companies. Offered by higher education institutes in Tampere and Hermia Ltd, Demola gives multidisciplinary student teams the opportunity to develop demo products and services based on company concepts. Companies ranging from local SMEs to international large-scale enterprises as well as public organizations collaborate with the teams.

Demola is an important case study because it reflects successful open innovation between companies and students within a dedicated (neutral) innovation environment and manages innovation ownership rights successfully Tampere, a city in Southern Finland, is an international growth centre for versatile services, know-how, and creativity. It is recognized that successful business activities and the growth in well- being brought to the area as a result of these activities can be enhanced significantly through investment in culture and in structures enabling innovation. The Creative Tampere Programme accepts this challenge by creating products, successful business, and new services based on content development, and by increasing the co- operation between creative sectors and business life. Demola directly responds to the issues raised in the Aho report of 2006 and the Finnish Innovation Strategy of 2008 through its focus on open innovation in a global environment.

The objective of Demola is to boost multidisciplinary agile innovation culture and encourage entrepreneurship in the Tampere region. The development of Demola in late 2008 coincided with the publication of a new innovation strategy for Finland to improve its competitive position in R&D markets given increased competition from emerging countries including China and India. Finland’s National Innovation Strategy (2008) identified that ‘around the world, leading edge companies are involving consumers in product development. Enterprises are even processing previously unrecognized needs together with users, thus influencing the emergence of a completely new kind of market. Various forms of open and public innovation activity are gaining ground alongside traditional closed innovation activity.

Answer the following question. Q1. What are the objectives to boost multidisciplinary agile innovation culture and encourage entrepreneurship in the Tampere region? Q2. What actions are to be taken for development? Q3. How the stack holders of Demola project have been benefited? Explain. Q4. Why the collaborative and multidisciplinary innovation environment is necessary for development?