OHK was hired to formulate and translate over 300 global best practices from nearly 100 innovation organizations performing innovation advocacy and support worldwide into a working model for a nationwide digital platform for Jordan. This mapping of best practices, combined with a comprehensive screening of Jordan’s existing innovation ecosystem, yielded a strategic vision and roadmap for a new organization, the National Center for Innovation, that is very strongly informed by an innovation support platform, the Jordan Open Innovation Platform (JOIP).
The viability and impact of JOIP are enhanced by the fact that IT B2B and B2C systems are underused in Jordan and that no overarching ICT framework has been applied across the innovation ecosystem, and therefore the platform has a broad remit to set innovation digital transactions standards that apply nation-wide. The strategic centrality of JOIP as the nucleus of Jordan’s innovation ecosystem is highlighted by OHK implementing a detailed technical design of the platform. Jordan suffers from a multiplicity of tech-enabled ambitions that have fallen short because the strategic and business logics are not translated into technical specifications, and thus there is no continuity of vision or personnel to ensure that digital platforms that are introduced enable e-government products that respond to country and stakeholder needs over time. OHK has implemented a 2-year long project to support Jordan avoid this pitfall. The thought leadership and visioning capability brought by the OHK team have realized the design and development of the platform to become a global leader in the use of technology in national innovation practices and enhance the development of an innovation-based society in Jordan.
First, JOIP is established as the leading portal to Jordan's innovation ecosystem and act as a single point for all things innovation through an integrated, technology-empowered cloud-based SaaS platform. JOIP is integral to the innovation mission of public and private stakeholders and the majority of their interventions. It turns support functions into digitized services and optimizes B2B and B2C exchange, cooperation and oversight tasks. The services in SaaS are enabled by productivity tools that automate the innovation processes involved such as lead qualification, recruitment, matchmaking, grant processing, and reporting. It does so while consolidating information, integrating organizations and individuals into one productivity space and building the collective inputs and outputs into a country-wide knowledge databases.
JOIP is the hub and marketplace for innovation services in Jordan as well as the open information highway for Jordan’s collaboration with the world. Therefore, it serves private and public stakeholders in Jordan and beyond and connects hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of researchers and entrepreneurs active in R&D and science and technology.
Secondly, JOIP utilizes a Cloud-Application-User Framework which acts as one integrated cloud computing, innovation processes’ workflow system built on applications that operate with and within cloud resources. JOIP is defined as a computing cloud made of a set of network-enabled applications that provide scalable services, service-guaranteed, normally personalized, and on-demand, and accessible in a simple, user-friendly and pervasive way. The P/SaaS technical architecture built for JOIP generates and aggregates value to help any organization active in innovation deploy and manage a spectrum of innovation activities that meet its target stakeholders or latent needs. The platform is built on functions common to R&D and innovation.
JOIP’s core users are not only the individuals in research centers, universities, or the private sector but also the organizations that house them and that are keen to use JOIP to derive information and use tools to help them improve their standing and the productiveness of their communities. Any organization in Jordan, government, public, private, donor, or NGO can join JOIP as an enterprise user and qualify part or all of its staff to become individual users in JOIP. The platform intends to achieve a balance between a tool available to all at a marginal cost and enough revenue to allow the platform to grow and develop. A pricing tier is adopted across both individual and enterprise users of JOIP with fees charged monthly or manually and depend on options such as the type of services the user accesses and the number of accounts per enterprise.
OHK has helped position JOIP as both a steward of Jordan’s innovation system and a provider of products and services to innovation stakeholders across the innovation value chain. Given the novelty of such a model in Jordan and the Middle East overall—where digital platforms built on products and services via modern web tools and applications—this sets a new model in the region and worldwide for one-stop-digital-shops offering innovation-support services to diverse and varied innovation stakeholders.
For more information about OHK’s innovation advisory services in emerging markets and across the globe, contact us.