Het programma
Exceed has four programme lines, which will be worked on concretely through mainly knowledge building and dissemination and coordination activities.
The commitment of Exceed is to achieve results in addressing four challenges that hinder the utilisation and scale-up of experimental environments as methodologies in the realisation of long-term societal missions and transitions. The programme aims to have a positive impact both on Dutch society and economy in general and on starting and existing experiment environments and their facilitating parties, such as governments and knowledge institutions.
1. An accessible and practical understanding of experimentation environments as methodologies.
Despite experimental environments being a popular research topic in both basic scientific research and application-oriented research circles, the wheel is constantly being reinvented. In part, this is understandable because application areas differ greatly from each other, as does the composition of partners involved. What works in one application area does not allow itself to be simply copied to another. It also points to a - still - too little understanding of the operation and scalability (replicability, see programme line 3) of such environments, and a lot of knowledge from research is 'hidden' in hardly accessible scientific articles and papers.
2. More synergy and coherence
Long-term missions require a vision on what the Netherlands needs in terms of experimental environments at what time. Some form of coordination is lacking at the moment, and self-organising capacity is low so far. It is in the interest of upscaling innovations that emerge from an experimental environment that these environments are part of a larger whole and connect with each other as well as with other parties in the innovation chain. In addition, a lack of synergy causes transition and interaction failures (lack of coherence between incentive instruments).
3. Support for longer-running experiment environments
Continuity of experimentation environments is a concern regularly raised, both in research literature and by the environments themselves. Indeed, in the context of mission-driven innovation policies with long-term transitions, continuity takes on added weight. Nevertheless, stimulating experimental environments always commits relatively large resources to the pilot phase, putting commitment to lab continuity at risk. This calls for coordination with and between the supporters of experimental environments (such as policymakers, financiers), and for a solid knowledge base of what the development path, the life cycle of experimental environments, looks like. This further involves the question of when an experimentation environment is actually successful, and what yardsticks can be used to determine that success.
Exceed's aim is not that every experimental environment must be continued regardless, but that frameworks are created from knowledge to determine when maintaining an experimental environment is or is not appropriate.
4. More parties connect and benefit
Despite experimental environments being triple or even quadruple helix connections, evaluations repeatedly show that the connection between experimental environment and private sector, and in particular SMEs, leaves much to be desired. Private parties that would like to, by no means always manage to connect to a relevant experimentation environment. This seems to be partly to do with a lack of information (entrepreneurs do not know what is available), unclear thematic positioning, little demand management and also systemic bottlenecks such as funding. At the same time, a more demand-driven approach is at odds with a mission-driven approach, in which value creation in such environments sometimes ends up in completely different places than with the participating parties.