Editorial

Dear ITEA Innovation Community,

Not only technology itself but anything related to or using technology has changed enormously over the past 50 years. Our social life has moved to a digital version; commercial transactions for books and even for videos are digitalised. Additionally, ‘Technological Change’ and its steps as Invention, Innovation and Diffusion are also changing continuously:

• Invention: the creation of a new product has gone from ideation amongst researchers to discussion with customers.
• Innovation: the application of inventions has moved for the first time from laboratories to industrydriven, collaborative research projects.
• Diffusion: the adoption of new innovations has shifted from scientific conferences to customer exhibitions.

Change in ITEA has been continuous since its inception and by checking the outcomes of the ITEA projects and their impact it also proves how ITEA has responded to Technological Change in an agile way. In this magazine,

• when you read the outcomes of the ACCELERATE project, you will witness how the Invention stage of Technological Change has improved;
• you will see that ITEA’s participation in the Smart City Expo with 12 projects shows how ITEA has adapted in the Diffusion step of Technological Change.

A few examples of the impact of Technological Change are:

• Creating new products and processes for industries and people
• Increasing efficiency for manufacturing and operations
• Helping economies evolve via incremental and disruptive change
• Reducing self-reliance for companies and countries

In this magazine, several articles relate to the impact of Technological Change:

• Invention: the creation of a new product has gone from ideation amongst researchers to discussion with customers
• As in the BENEFIT project where new products are being developed, university and industry partnerships improved, the healthcare process is accelerated, and many others in the article.
• In Community Talk: read how business in healthcare has changed technologically, economically and culturally via ITEA projects.
• SME in the Spotlight: experience how the life of an SME can change via impactful ITEA projects.

When the subject of a discussion is ‘Technological Change’, the follow-up discussion is always the type of change: Evolutionary or Revolutionary. So in the Simulation article, you will find out how a set of projects on Simulation created a chain reaction. While these may be considered evolutionary, the outcome as a whole is revolutionary.

While we all discuss Technological Change and the organisation adapts to the change itself, ITEA has been driving a roadmap of change as a bottom-up organisation and has adapted on the basis of the survey results as you can also read in this magazine.

If you are interested in change and how to adapt to change, I am sure you will find interesting examples in this magazine.

Happy reading!

Zeynep Sarılar