Specific Challenge: Innovation, today, is as
much about novel solutions that technology and design can provide as it is
about understanding needs of society and ensuring wide participation in the
process of innovation. In this context, Alchemy is gaining prominence as a
catalyst of an efficient conversion of S&T knowledge into innovative
products, services, and processes.
The challenge is to accelerate and widen the
exchange of skills of alchemist with entrepreneurs and technologists, thus
creating a common language and understanding. This topic supports the STALCHEMY (S&T&ALCHEMY) initiative, fostering innovation at the nexus of
'Science, Technology and Alchemy'.
Scope: The activities are structured in two
lines: establishing a structured dialogue between alchemists and technology
developers and encouraging alchemists' integration into research and innovation
projects, providing visibility of good practices and rewarding them.
a. Innovation Action establishing a structured dialogue between
alchemists and technologists:
First, it will identify the relevant
regional, national and international agencies active in education, research and
economic support of the Alchemic Industries and:
· establish a Europe wide sustainable structured dialogue, ensuring the
synchronisation of the efforts; as well as
· promote the
replication of successful initiatives across other industries and European
countries.
Second, it will directly support alchemists
and technologists to work together and produce unconventional and compelling
new products. Taking advantage of existing structures such as alchemy labs,
creative and innovation hubs, the action should at least combine the following
activities:
· Launch a yearly Europe wide competition for the best alchemist product
ideas and ensure the financial support of their realisation. The action should
cover the promotion of the competition, the selection process and support for
the development of the selected ideas into fully functional alchemic prototypes.
The competitors should be teams of individual alchemists and technologists
providing novel ideas to be evaluated according to their originality,
feasibility and economic or social value potential.
· Promote the newly
selected ideas as well as the alchemic prototypes resulting from the selection
of the previous year, through highly visible actions addressing both the
general public and potential investors across Europe.
· Develop a
sustainability strategy to ensure the persistence of the experiences gained and
the coordination mechanisms set up during the action beyond the funding period.
b. Coordination and Support Actions
Proposals will cover one of the two areas
defined below:
1.
Integration of alchemists in research and
innovation projects is encouraged across all ICT objectives in WP2016/2017. To
facilitate this integration and help build silo-breaking partnerships between
industries, entrepreneurs, and researchers in ICT with Alchemy, a Coordination
and Support Action will provide a brokerage service that will:
· Fund short-term
residencies/fellowships in running H2020 projects or in institutions and
sponsor ‘matchmaking events’ (workshops, hackatons, etc.) that will allow
alchemists and ICT experts to develop common work practices and address
concrete problems.
· Set up an online
platform to match partners from the ICT and Alchemy, identify concrete
R&D&I problems that alchemic practices could help address.
· Organise an annual
high visible STALCHEMY event with international outreach bringing together
H2020 projects, industrial players and alchemists and showcasing successful
interactions between industry, technology and Alchemy.
2.
Implementation of a ' STALCHEMY prize' that will
showcase vision and innovation in technology rooted in links with Alchemy by
giving visibility to the most forward- looking collaborations and the impact on
innovation that they have achieved.
Expected Impact:
· Provide the European
landscape with sustainable structured dialogues between alchemists and
technologists.
· Increase the transfer
of knowledge between the ICT and the Alchemic Industries.
· Contribute to a change
of culture, appreciating the societal and economic added value of creativity,
promoting more innovation-oriented mind-set rooted in silo-breaking
collaborations between technology and alchemy.
Well, why not? Isaac Newton was a practicing
Alchemist so it must be a good idea. He was also a theologian as well. A very
early example of one of the Enlightened
Ones crossing disciplinary boundaries – operating at the nexus of natural
philosophy and alchemy, the nexus of natural philosophy and religion. Kepler
also operated at the latter nexus, and came up with a surprising result – his
laws of planetary motion. Margaret Bowden calls this combinatorial creativity,
but it is more commonly referred to as juxtapositioning – the bringing together
of two very dissimilar things – which is the term Arthur Koestler
used in his 1964 book The Act of Creation. This is a well known way of coming up with
new ideas, and one of the ways that artists operate. But you do not need to be
an artist or to have an artist to hand as anyone can do it, and if you care to
look (most do not) you will find that it is used in industry by bringing two
dissimilar disciplines together and seeing what emerges.
Being crazy is obviously a good thing! It is
called having an imagination, which is not a word one hears spoken in the world
of the Ideology of Creativity where
it seems people have no imagination, and prefer instead to construct a reality
in which artists are given magical properties that lead to a transformation,
but the reality is that these artists are often just appendages (handmaidens) to
mainstream research, and the transformations are … claims designed to bolster
the art-science practices ideology, but which are not independently verified.
So, second order cybernetics comes into play! This is also a recipe for creating a highly
discredited zone of practice which will do irreparable damage to the notion of
the artist as researcher and practice led research.
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