Greek Scientists Society / Methodology series 03 of 03

Contents

01PremiseWhy a consortium is not yet an ecosystem 02TheoryFour kinds of capital held by a network 03ArchitectureThe five layers of an Atlas 04StakeholdersThe quadruple helix as geography 05ConversionFour moves from map to outcome 06Suggested approachFour stages, new and running Actions 07DiagnosisMaturity levels and indicators 08GovernanceConsent, provenance, stewardship 09In practiceThe first deployment, in draft 10Series and next stepsWhere this sits, and what follows

Start here00The methodology series Previous02From Mapping to Impact You are reading03The Innovation Atlas

The instrument of the GSS methodology series

The Innovation Atlas

The instrument behind the framework: how a research consortium becomes a living innovation ecosystem.

Every funded network already owns more intelligence than it can see. The people are listed, the themes are agreed, the facilities exist, the contacts are in inboxes. What is missing is not effort, it is a structure that makes the network legible to itself.

This framework describes that structure. It is instrument agnostic and domain agnostic: it applies to a COST Action, a Horizon consortium, a doctoral network, a cluster or a learned society. The Innovation Atlas is simply its working form.

Series 03 of 03 Follows From Mapping to Impact Form Five layers, one taxonomy Scope Domain agnostic Status Open framework

01 / Premise

A consortium is a contract. An ecosystem is a behaviour.

The Memorandum of Understanding creates obligations, work packages and a governance chart. None of that produces circulation. Networks that stop at the contract tend to fail in three recognisable ways, and each failure is a mapping failure before it is a management failure.

Failure one

The list that ages

A roster of names and institutions, accurate on the day it was exported and ageing from that moment. It answers who joined. It is rarely able to answer who can do what, with whom, and by when.

Failure two

The network that never converts

Meetings generate goodwill that is difficult to act on. Capability often sits one degree away from the need it could address, and the adjacency stays invisible because no shared record holds it.

Failure three

The legacy that expires

The final report is filed, the website lapses, and the relationships return to private address books. Several years of relational capital are lost simply because they were never held anywhere collective.

A network you cannot query is a network you cannot convert.

In most cases the corrective is not more coordination. It is representation. When a consortium can be consulted by any member, in plain language, along the dimensions that matter to innovation (who, what, where, with which asset, toward which purpose) it tends to behave differently over time. That gradual shift in behaviour, rather than the database itself, is what the word ecosystem is pointing at.

02 / Theory

Map the human intelligence, not the organisational chart.

An Action holds four kinds of capital. Three are well described in the intellectual capital literature and can be held directly. The fourth cannot: it is produced only by converting the other three, and it is the one that carries research out of the network and into use.

Capital	What the network already holds	What the Atlas records	What it converts into
Human	Individual expertise, methods, tacit skill, languages, career stage, willingness to act	People, with declared competencies and roles rather than titles alone	Capacity Teams that can be assembled on demand
Structural	Facilities, equipment, datasets, protocols, models, software, standards, training material	Assets, with access conditions and a named custodian	Capability Work that can actually be performed
Relational	Trust with policymakers, regulators, agencies and organisations, with industry where relevant, and with the communities specific to the Action: patients, farmers, practitioners, schools, media	Stakeholders, positioned on the helix and on the value chain	Absorption Someone ready to receive the result
Innovation	Ideas in progress, prototypes, IP, spin-off intentions, policy openings, unmet needs	Opportunities, with a stage, an owner and a date	Outcome Applications, policies, standards, services that reach people

The framework treats these as stocks and flows. Mapping measures the stock. Impact is the flow. In most cases a network with high human capital and limited absorption capacity produces excellent literature and little movement beyond it. That is a complete outcome for a research programme and a partial one for a programme asked to deliver societal benefit.

03 / Architecture

Five layers, one geography.

An atlas is not a list, it is a set of layers that share coordinates. Each layer is legible alone and more useful in overlay. Select a layer to raise it.

Answers
Who in this network works on X, with method Y, and would join a proposal on Z.

Minimum record
Name, affiliation, country, role in the network, three to five declared competencies, career stage, contact consent.

Health signal
Share of members with enriched profiles, and share of profiles updated in the last twelve months.

Failure mode
Recording titles instead of competencies. A chair in biology tells you standing, not what the network can call on.
Answers
What this network is about, expressed in terms an outsider can search and a member can claim.

Minimum record
A controlled vocabulary of twenty to sixty terms: working groups, research areas, methods, application domains, target problems.

Health signal
Terms that no member claims (dead vocabulary) and terms claimed by a single member (single points of failure).

Failure mode
Letting the taxonomy grow uncontrolled. Two hundred free-text keywords are a filing system, not a map.
Answers
Where can this experiment be run, which dataset already exists, who holds the protocol.

Minimum record
Asset name, type, host institution, location, access conditions, custodian, whether external users are accepted.

Health signal
Number of assets used by a member of a different institution than the host.

Failure mode
Listing facilities without access conditions, which produces enquiries that go nowhere.
Answers
Who outside the consortium needs this result, and which member holds that relationship today.

Minimum record
Organisation, helix, position on the value chain, country, relationship owner, current state of engagement.

Health signal
Proportion of non academic entries, and the ratio of stakeholders engaged to stakeholders merely identified.

Failure mode
Entries with no owner inside the network. Those are contacts rather than relationships, and they seldom survive a change of coordinator.
Answers
What is in progress now, at what stage, and which missing competence or partner would move it forward.

Minimum record
Title, type (proposal, prototype, protected result, policy window, standard, service), stage, owner, what it still needs, next date.

Health signal
Movement. Items that change stage between reporting periods, rather than items added.

Failure mode
Treating this layer as a showcase of past achievements. It works as a live pipeline, and reads as decoration when it is not.

Mapping an existing Atlas onto the layers

Layer	Typical Atlas categories	Query it must answer in one step
People	Members, working groups, expertise, leadership roles, early career researchers	Find three people in two countries who share a method and are open to a collaboration or a joint grant application.
Themes	Research areas, disciplines, technologies, target problems, application contexts	Show every member and asset attached to one theme.
Assets	Infrastructures, facilities, datasets, models, protocols, training resources	Show the infrastructures in this region that accept external users.
Stakeholders	Industry, agencies and regulators, civil society and end users, media and education	Show the non academic actors on this value chain segment and who owns each relationship.
Opportunities	Emerging innovations, IP and patents, R&D pipeline, spin-offs, policy briefs, mobility	Show what is at prototype stage and what competence it is missing.

The layer model is deliberately thin. Any Atlas with more than five top level categories should be able to fold them into these five without residue. Where a category will not fold, it is usually an output record (papers, events, deliverables), which belongs with the reporting record rather than on the map.

04 / Stakeholders

The quadruple helix, treated as geography rather than as a diagram.

The helix is usually drawn as four interlocking bands and left there. To make it operational, each actor needs three coordinates: which helix, where on the value chain, and who inside the network holds the relationship.

Helix	Who this includes	What they can give the network	What they need from it
Academia	Universities, institutes, learned societies, doctoral schools, adjacent networks and Actions	Method, validation, talent pipeline, co-authorship, access to further consortia	Problems worth studying, data, joint supervision, visibility
Industry	SMEs, large firms, producers, technology providers, clusters, investors, incubators	Real constraints, scale-up capacity, co-funding, route to market, testing environments	De-risked technology, evidence, standards, trained people
Government	Ministries, agencies, regulators, standards bodies, regional authorities, funders	Legitimacy, regulatory pathways, procurement, follow-on funding, uptake at scale	Evidence in usable form, timing aligned to policy windows, a single credible interlocutor
Society	End users, patients, farmers, practitioners, NGOs, schools, media, citizen science groups	Definition of what matters, field data, adoption, social licence, communication reach	Plain language, participation on their terms, results that return to them

The concept, and where it comes from

Four interweaving strands labelled academia and universities, industry and business, government and public sector, and civil society.

The triple helix model described the interplay of universities, industry and government. The quadruple helix adds the public: media based and culture based communities, civil society and the people who live with the results.

Carayannis, E. G. and Campbell, D. F. J. Quadruple and quintuple helix innovation systems. Reference retained here for the concept, not for the diagram.

Rule one

No orphan stakeholders

Every entry carries the name of a member who holds the relationship. Entries without an owner are set aside at each review. In most cases this one rule is what keeps a stakeholder map from settling into a mailing list.

Rule two

State, not category

Record the state of each relationship: identified, contacted, engaged, collaborating, co-investing. Progress is movement between states, and it is reportable without inventing metrics.

Rule three

Position before persuasion

Place the actor in the chain of use first (evidence, practice, provision, regulation, adoption). Position suggests what is worth offering them. The category alone rarely does.

05 / Conversion

Four moves turn a map into an outcome.

Mapping is necessary and inert. Conversion is what the coordinator, the working group leaders and the innovation manager actually do with the map. Each move has an owner and a rhythm.

Move 01

Aggregate

Make the invisible countable. Pull scattered expertise into one queryable surface so the network can see its own mass.

Who do we have, and what can they do?

Move 02

Adjacent

Find the unlikely pair. Combinations across themes and countries are where novelty lives, and they are invisible without overlay.

Which two capabilities have never met?

Move 03

Absorb

Attach a receiver to every promising result before it exists. A finding with no named absorber will not travel further than a journal.

Who is waiting for this, and in what form?

Move 04

Activate

Put a date, an owner and an instrument on it: a short mobility, a joint proposal, a policy brief, a licence, a spin-off, a standard.

What happens next, and by when?

The four moves are a cycle, not a funnel. A network in steady state runs all four continuously, and the Atlas is the shared memory that lets a new working group leader pick up the cycle without inheriting anyone's inbox.

06 / Approach

A suggested approach, in four stages.

This is a suggested sequence rather than a prescription, and the order tends to matter more than the pace. Enrichment attempted before a baseline exists usually returns low response rates. Activation attempted before enrichment produces matches members have little reason to trust. Legacy planning left to the final year tends to produce a website that lapses.

For a new Action the four stages sit comfortably one per grant period. For an Action already running, stages 01 and 02 can be compressed into a few months, since the roster, the working groups and much of the vocabulary already exist, and stage 03 can begin in the same period. Stages 01 to 03 put From Mapping to Impact into practice (also available as a PDF). Stage 04 is where this framework hands over to From MoU to Legacy, published separately.

Baseline

Harvest what already exists rather than asking members for anything. Everything in this phase can be assembled from documents the network already produced.

Extract the roster, working groups and country coverage from the official record
Derive the first taxonomy from the MoU objectives and working group titles
List known infrastructures from partner institution pages
Publish the incomplete version openly and label the gaps

Output: a shared object people can argue with

Enrichment

Convert the roster into declared capability. Ask members to correct their own record, which is a far lighter request than asking them to create one.

One short structured form: competencies from the controlled vocabulary, assets, stakeholders held, opportunities in progress
Explicit consent for each field that will be public, recorded with a date
Working group leaders review their own section rather than the coordinator chasing individuals
Verification pass on assets and stakeholder ownership

Output: a map with declared, consented, attributable content

Activation

Use the map in every routine decision until using it becomes the default. Adoption comes from consequence, not from communication.

Virtual Mobility and short term scientific missions directed at the gaps the map makes visible, which is also how the enrichment work itself is usually resourced
Proposal teams assembled from queries, with the query shown
Stakeholder engagement planned by helix and value chain position
Each meeting opens with what moved on the opportunities plate

Output: decisions that cite the map

Legacy

Decide who holds the map after the funding ends, while the funding still exists. This is the point at which the framework hands over to the sustainability method.

Name a custodian: the founding partners of the Post Action Sustainability Plan, a society or association, a successor network, a host institution, or a follow up collaboration already under way
Release a versioned, citable snapshot with a persistent identifier
Separate the archived record from the living instrument, and keep both
Define the minimum maintenance that keeps it alive: one update cycle per year is enough

Output: an asset that outlives the Action

07 / Diagnosis

Where is your network today?

Each level is diagnosed by observable behaviour, not by the software in use. Most networks sit at level one and describe themselves as level three.

Roster

A list of names and institutions exists for reporting purposes. It is seldom consulted when a decision has to be made.

Indicators worth reporting

Family	What it measures	Examples
Capacity	How much intelligence is visible	Enriched profiles as a share of members, countries with declared assets, vocabulary terms with more than one claimant
Connectivity	How much of it is in contact	Cross-country and cross-theme pairs formed, assets used outside the host institution, stakeholders with a named owner
Conversion	What became something else	Opportunities that changed stage, proposals submitted by teams first assembled through the map, policy or industry uptake events

Report conversion sparingly and honestly. Three traced conversions with named owners are more persuasive to a reviewer, and more useful to the network, than forty counted interactions.

08 / Governance

The conditions that keep a map trustworthy.

A stakeholder map holds information about people, some of it contributed by others on their behalf. Trust is the operating requirement here, and it is far easier to keep than to rebuild.

Consent

Declared, dated, revocable

Public fields are contributed by the person they describe, recorded with a date, and removable on request. Personal contact details stay behind access control by default, and records that carry commercially sensitive content are restricted rather than open. These are the conditions the framework asks for, in line with GDPR principles. Any deployment should confirm its own legal basis with its host institution.

Provenance

Every record has a known source

Content arrives in one of three ways: contributed by the person or institution it concerns, suggested by another member, or drawn from a public document. Suggestions and contributions are reviewed by a moderator before they appear, and the source is kept with the record so that a later reader can see where it came from.

Stewardship

A named steward, and a contact inside the Action

One person maintains the map, working with a designated contact from the Action who knows the network from the inside. Continuity of access between grant periods is part of the arrangement, so that updates do not depend on a single meeting or a single term of office.

Two further disciplines matter more than they sound. Keep the vocabulary under editorial control, with one person able to decline new terms so that the taxonomy stays usable. And version the whole map at least once a year, so that a claim made in a report can be checked against the state of the map on the day the claim was made.

09 / In practice

The first deployment: an Innovation Atlas for aquaculture.

The framework was built by doing it. The reference deployment maps a European aquaculture network across seven public categories, one controlled taxonomy and six ways of reading the same records. Figures below are a snapshot of that deployment, not a target for anyone else.

Draft deployment. The figures below are a snapshot of a live build and will change. They are shown to illustrate proportions between the layers, not as a benchmark for any other Action.

Categories as published, with the layer each one belongs to

125PeopleLayer 01

37KnowledgeLayer 02

16Application contextLayer 02

24InfrastructureLayer 03

19EcosystemLayer 04

17Innovation and IPLayer 05

18Outputs and eventsReporting record

256Records, one taxonomy

Seven categories, five layers. Knowledge and application context are two faces of the same disciplinary layer: what the network knows, and where that knowledge is applied. Outputs and events (media and dissemination on one side, meetings and mobility on the other) sit deliberately outside the map. They record what the Action has produced and reported, while the five layers record what it is able to do next.

Not every record is open. Entries that carry protected or commercially sensitive content, patents in particular, are visible in outline and restricted in detail, so that the existence of a result can be discovered without exposing what should not be public. This is why an open view shows fewer entries than the total.

Screenshot of the BioAqua Innovation Atlas: seven category tiles above a filter panel and a map of Europe showing member and stakeholder locations. — The BioAqua Innovation Atlas, under development. Seven category tiles, a filter panel for working group, country, theme and stakeholder helix, and six ways of reading the same records. Interface and figures are provisional.

Six readings of the same records

Map

Where capability physically sits, with density by country and region.

Explore

Faceted browsing by working group, country and theme, for members who do not know what they are looking for yet.

Table

The full record, sortable and exportable, for coordinators preparing a report or a proposal.

Stats

Coverage and gaps, which is where the network can see for itself where it is thin.

Architecture

The taxonomy and data model made public, so the structure can be audited and reused.

Contribute

The enrichment route. Members correct their own record rather than the coordinator chasing them.

10 / Series

How this fits the wider method.

Three published components address three different questions. They can be adopted separately and tend to work best in sequence. Further work is under way.

01 / The sequence

From MoU to Legacy

Sustainability planning. What survives the end of the mandate, who holds it, and how a network converts an expiring agreement into a standing capability.

02 / The structure

From Mapping to Impact

Strategic stakeholder framework. How the intelligence held by a consortium is made visible, positioned on the helix, and converted into outcomes.

03 / This document

The Innovation Atlas

The working form of the framework: five layers over one taxonomy, deployable for any Action, with the same architecture across cohorts and domains. The first deployment is documented in section 09.

In development

Convergence, and the work behind it

A framework describing the exchange itself, what happens once a map shows that a capability in one country and a need in another have not yet met, together with an operational approach for running this across several Actions. Neither is published yet.

The step after the instrument

From one Atlas to many.

One Atlas serves one network. Many Atlases on one architecture would begin to behave as a single ecosystem: adjacent Actions able to find each other, capability visible wherever it sits, and the conversion moves running between networks rather than inside one.

Adjacent is the operative word. Actions working the same problem from different disciplines rarely meet, because nothing tells them they are neighbours. A shared architecture would.

What that asks of each Action is small: a common minimum record, a published vocabulary crosswalk, clarity on what may be read across boundaries.

The aim is to support European science in finding its place in a global setting, and the Atlases are a first step toward it. An ecosystem is built one connected map at a time. That is the direction of the work, rather than a description of where it stands today.