The context of the Innovation Agenda

The Innovation Agenda emerges to do, out of science, technology and the innovation a public matter, where can converge the questions and demands of society (about companies, organized communities, the State by itself, national and local) and the intellectual abilities and techniques developed by themselves. When a space of concertation is decided around subjects and problems considered to be priority, and that deserve the contest of knowledge and technology, the mechanism of the Agenda changes the sign of public policies to interactive forms and cooperative methods, opening the democratic participation to actors which previously were traditional functions of experts, as the attachment of priorities and objectives. As a public policies program, the Agenda conforms a social strategy of investment and negotiation, opened to social look and tied to accountability.

The agenda goes beyond the framework of the State and its policy to raise as a valid and efficient methodology to social management of knowledge in any field, insofar as it allows to delimit a shared field of problems and to install different possibilities to solve them from knowledge and technology. To this end, the knowledge and learning database of a company or network of companies, of a community network, of a group of municipalities and, ministries and other official bodies, can become a tool of productivity, for improving the quality of life, for increasing effectiveness and efficiency in order to generate social capital. The development of an Agenda in itself represents a network of conversations, commitments and equally attitudes that make possible a distribution and appropriation of knowledge and the dimensions associated with it, made by society, (creation, training, capacity building, information, transfer), such as the generation of the context of innovation, where the supply and demand of knowledge and technology is found.

The Agenda also is a space to learn in new ways how to build societies and organizational forms in line with the new scenarios, as far as in the converge participative conception of State and its politics on a par with a more participatory community, moving jointly towards the construction of a “Society of Knowledge”. On the other hand, the Agendas are based on operating styles associated with teamwork, confidence building, communication and cooperation. The logic behind the Agendas process involves interactive working styles that make it possible for participants to legitimize each other in a climate of respect and dialogue. For this reason, the Agendas constitute a democratic way of building citizenship.