About MIST

MIST (Modelling Innovation Sustainability and Technologies) is a non-profit think-tank organization aiming at fostering the production of high-level research actions in the domains of economics, information, knowledge and environment.

The think-tank organised the first MIST 2015 Conference which will take place in Oeiras (Lisbon), Portugal  on 22-23 October. The event is planned to organisations and experts and enable them to collect valuable information, knowledge and wisdom.

Resistance to change can be easily disguised with well-founded arguments, such as: “We should let others make the mistakes first”. In Finland, this clichéd saying has its basis in the careful undertone of Finnish culture. In reality, the result of this negative attitude is that a person does not have to use his/her own brain or do anything. Resistance to change is mainly based on an individual’s desire for comfort (Lappalainen, 2009).

Portugal: building bridges between people and regions

Situated between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, Portugal always had and may continue to have, an important role when it comes to building bridges between people and regions.

Modern innovation spaces span beyond clusters mainly in two dimensions: firstly, the traditional triple helix innovation model with enterprises, research and public sector players (being often topdown) is replaced by the co-creative quadruple helix innovation model where users have an active role too, in all phases of the innovation, from the early ideation to the co-creation of solutions. Secondly, the ecosystem drives for multi-disciplinarity rather than clusters, which tend to be quite monolithic (Bror Salmelin, 2015).

When the global crisis disrupted the markets and the world economy, Portugal experienced an economic and financial scenario delay, leading to a strong increase of the employment rate. Similarly, not only this European country faces such scenario and, it should be more like it across all Europe and OECD countries as well.

The rise of the middle class in China, Brazil and India among other countries, the challenges on the employment and the future of work in the context of automation, poverty reduction, water and climate change represent just a shortlist of very good reasons to investigate and to discover innovative solutions to answer the world global questions and to design from the scratch new business models that address environmental impacts.

High-tech industry, entrepreneurs, civil participants, and academia (quadruple helix) should not only discuss the facts and concepts but also collaborate together under common platforms of R&D&I for advancing new innovation applied economics, policy experimental modelling and technologies.

In open and participative innovation processes, ecosystem participants experience multiple gains—business can develop the scalable product and service solutions that users want, the public sector can provide effective and affordable solutions to regional challenges, citizens share ownership of the specific, often highly personalized solutions they need, and universities can actively contribute knowledge and reap new knowledge and insights in return (Markku Markkula & Hank Kune, 2015).

What to expect from MIST2015 and what shall be the follow-up actions?

• New ideas;
• Cross-disciplinary interaction;
• Insight to new research and innovation approaches;
• Seed from new collaborative projects across boundaries.

MIST 2015 will create the time and space for interaction and creativity and will mainly focus on future actions. And even-though the event will also follow the traditional academic conference approach, it will also aim at developing an environment for "open science" prioritizing the cross-cutting of modern research and innovation methods, and highlighting impactful research and evidence-base policy-making.

The registration for the conference is still open.