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The success scenario approach has been developed by teams based in Manchester, and focusing on issues of RTDI policy. It has been used to develop UK policy at the highest level in Information and Communication Technologies, Biotechnology and Nanotechnology . More recently the methodology has been extended to consider the future for structural innovation policy issues such as university-industry linkages and policy for FP7.

There are two elements to a success scenario. It combines:

  • Desirability. The scenario captures a vision of what could be achieved or aspired to, by the sponsoring organisation or a wider community that it represents.
  • Credibility. The scenario is developed with the assistance of, and validated by, a sample of experts in the area, chosen to reflect a broad range of interests (and usually including both practitioners and researchers).

The heart of the process is a scenario workshop; this is supported by background research, and organised in a detailed set of procedures. The background research (normally SWOT or benchmarking analysis) aims to identify a set of sub-domains that can be studied in depth. The benchmarking helps to compare the region, country of organisation with relevant others in the various sub-domains. The comparison should be able to identify trends and dynamics, and the systemic elements of the domain. It should be prepared in such as way as to indicate what informants and available literature suggest might be possible - one way of presenting results in the light of a small set of scenarios for the development of the domain. This provides the workshop participants with a base against which to frame their own preferred scenario.

The INNFORMED project plans to use the innovation systems approach to structure the scenario building activities. It begins with the observation that changes in firms’ innovation environment and the underlying drivers have forced governments to re-evaluate their role in innovation. Currently the role of government is seen mainly as a facilitator - that is a provider of framework conditions conducive for innovation. The new role of governments has made it necessary to find new approaches for innovation policy that can deal with a wide set of framework conditions and complex interactions between different types of actors. The answer has been sought in systemic approaches, which started to be adopted in the early 1990s. The main idea behind the innovation systems approach is to see the firm’s innovation environment as a system of actors, interactions and framework conditions. The original starting point was to analyse national innovation systems, but in recent years regional innovation systems have also been studied.