The world around us is changing rapidly and continuously presenting new challenges. Problems like climate change, increasing pollution and diminishing reserves of natural resources are facing the global community daily.
The Jyväskylä Region is piloting a new innovation ecosystem based on sustainable innovations. The existing concept of innovation refers to introducing something new and useful, whether it's a new product, service, process, operating or business model.
According to professor Antti Hautamäki from the University of Jyväskylä, sustainable innovation adds aspects of sustainable development to that context and is based on ethically, socially, economically and environmentally prevailing principles. In business, the motivation for innovation has been to create better competitiveness in the market place. That has usually been achieved by two strategies; to cut the costs or by creating better products than competitors.
Sustainable innovation offers a third strategy which is to create products or processes with desirable features like durability and material or energy efficiency. It also seems that consumers are demanding these kinds of qualities and are even willing to pay more for sustainable products.
Jyväskylä Innovation Ltd is managing and coordinating extensive development programs of which the Centre of Expertise for Energy Technology is focusing in sustainable energy and energy efficiency.
During the year 2009 the programme's focus has been on discovering new business opportunities from the overlapping surfaces between the energy technology and other clusters and supporting the internationalization of the SME companies. Good examples of these actions are for instance the coordinated export operations for the SME bioenergy companies. The main markets that our actions are directed to are Europe, Russia and China. An article of one of the success stories, Metener Ltd, can be read in this magazine.
Another interesting opening is the Energy Technology Centre's role as the leading partner in the EU project named GasHighWay. The project aims at increasing the use of the environmentally benign gaseous vehicle fuels, biogas and natural gas, in transport sector and promoting the production and upgrading of biogas for vehicle fuel, as well as injection of the upgraded biogas to the natural gas grid. The long-term objective of the project is to promote the realisation of a network of filling stations for biogas and natural gas reaching from the northernmost tip of Europe, Finland, to the south, Italy.
We have chosen renewable energy as our theme for this issue. It is only a small, though important, area in the whole context of sustainable innovation ecosystem. Yet, at the end of the day, small important areas when combined with one another result in a change towards a sustainable global ecosystem.
Veli-Pekka Heikkinen, Managing Director, Jyväskylä Innovation Ltd