The innovation challenge in Spain: A Delphi study

Public funding for information and communication technology (ICT) innovation in Spain appears to be slow, bureaucratic, highly restrictive, and not agile. Therefore, the innovation process is negatively affected. These restrictions could be attributed to inadequate trust from public funders toward executors and ontological problems regarding the definitions of ICT innovation (i.e., the I+D+i formula), affecting all Quadruple Helix stakeholders. In this study, a Delphi study was proposed to reach a consensus among 81 experts (i.e., innovation managers, public funders, and consultants) to validate this hypothesis. The study included 41 statements and 59 questions organized into the following five objectives: (1) concept of innovation, (2) public funding and its restrictions, (3) theoretical model of innovation, (4) public funders' trust and executors' freedom, (5) assessment of capabilities and maturity for innovation. The experts discussed, evaluated, and reached a consensus, after two rounds, on 52 of the 59 questions. The results revealed wide dispersion of the proposed ICT innovation questions. They demonstrated that the innovation management ecosystem in Spain's ICT context is immature and the I+D+i formula did not represent the innovation process. The study reached a consensus on requirements for an Agile Innovation Funding Framework (AIFF) oriented toward obtaining an improved competitive advantage for ICT products or services based on trust, transparency, inspection, and adaptation principles. The results revealed that a joint framework involving public funders and executors based on organizational capability and maturity positively affects the innovation process. The capabilities of the executors should be standardized and measured, and public funders must move from supervisors to mentors to acquire new capabilities. Furthermore, innovation regulation and the various types of calls for proposals should be analyzed globally to change their fiscal and controlling nature restricting innovation.