Building Blocks for innovative solutions are concepts/methods/tools gradually built by RIST experts from academic sources, observation of practices, and experience acquired in various fields with our partners. In a sense, these building blocks consist of an accumulation and compilation of these diverse elements, which is then translated into the dynamic construction of collective expertise. This expertise is then made openly available to our new partners. It is fully visible as a transparent resource and serves as a basis for RIST’s interactions with its partners, thereby allowing for the co-construction and adaptation of a customized tool. We furthermore use whatever we learn from these experiences to feed into other building blocks and even to reshape them.
A platform is a set of academically interrelated technologies that are available for frequent use in a specific domain. A platform defines a field of knowledge and intervention. It is a heritage of expertise that is maintained and developed further. Platforms are “porous” and “ameboid”; they overlap and have common building blocks, for innovative solutions.
Corresponding to this collective expertise that is applicable in RIST’s missions, we find the competences of RIST’s individual consultants who are skilled in the use of building blocks. They are able to adapt such technologies and, based on them, to use specific tools in often highly complex situations. In so doing they add value while respecting the partner’s organizational and human environment. Such individual competences can in a sense be compared to expertise as we understand it at RIST.
Platforms and building blocks for innovative solutions are means to present our offer and to align our activities, from the research-action to the output stages. Our mission is to produce value in the management of research and innovation by applying expertise based on academic products (economics, sociology and in particular management, as well as technology, psychology, ethnology, etc.) and acquired in the various “business” fields in which we operate, along with best practice identified and captured in our work.
It is therefore important to align these different elements, and especially:
- to check that our applied expertise is soundly based on a “mature” mix of the best academic data and an “intelligent” observation of best practice;
- more dynamically, to ensure that we have the means to develop expertise in line with market trends, with our own interests, with academic dynamics, and with our specific areas of expertise.
RIST ensures that its Scientific Committee keeps an analytical eye on the nature of this alignment, challenging RIST’s orientations and making recommendations on:
- the level of academic knowledge that can be applied in the field of each platform
- in particular their level of maturity (in the sense of TRL or CRL)
- the level of the RIST team’s mastery of this knowledge
- the way in which this knowledge is incorporated into building blocks to produce innovative solutions.
The way in which the expertise is deployed, that is, how building blocks are shaped and developed to cater for the complex realities of the situations to which they are applied.
