CONEX: Creating serendipitous connections among Living Labs and Horizon 2020 challenges

This paper presents an online serendipity experiment allowing academic and industrial research labs to quickly identify collaboration opportunities and form H2020 proposal consortia. This work was carried out in the context of a Living Labs Matchmaking session organized during the 4th Living Labs Summer School. A set of 18 Living Labs data and H2020 Challenges data were entered in a software prototype named CONEX. The main objective consisted in identifying collaboration opportunities among participating Living-Labs for collectively answering to the EU Horizon2020 first call-for-proposals. The software prototype used for simulating a serendipity service was developed within previous EU research projects. This work addresses the paradox of systematizing unexpected or serendipitous connections that normally happen quite rarely. The actual findings reveal the feasibility of quickly exploring serendipitous connections in order to efficiently form Open Innovation ecosystems as recommended in the OI2 paradigm. However, findings unveil that terms used in all parsed and indexed content-objects have to be harmonized regardless the type of involved communities (e.g. folksonomy). It also reveals that profiling participating entities in using produced content-objects ensures a higher trust level compared to more traditional declarative approaches.