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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.++39/011/6666462, e-mail occelli@ires.piemonte.it. Premises.
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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.++39/011/6666462, e-mail occelli@ires.piemonte.it
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)
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
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.
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
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
Views of innovation and perspectives on the relationships between ICTs and regional systems
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….
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
The strategic projects of the Piedmont ICT Policy Program (WI -PIE)
The activities of the observatory as drivers of a learning process about the relationships between ICT and regional development
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