22-23 October 2015
Oeiras (Lisbon), Portugal

MIST (Modelling Innovation Sustainability and Technologies) is a non-profit organization think-tank structured to enable the production of high-level research activities in the domains of economics, information, knowledge and environment aiming to gather valuable information, knowledge and wisdom to organizations and individuals (knowledge triangle).

Resistance to change can be easily disguised with well-founded arguments, such as: “We should let others make the mistakes first”. In Finland, this clichéd saying has its basis in the careful undertone of Finnish culture. In reality, the result of this negative attitude is that a person does not have to use his/her own brain or do anything. Resistance to change is mainly based on an individual’s desire for comfort (Lappalainen, 2009).

Situated between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, Portugal always had and may continue to have, an important role when it comes to building bridges between people and regions.

Modern innovation spaces span beyond clusters mainly in two dimensions: firstly, the traditional triple helix innovation model with enterprises, research and public sector players (being often topdown) is replaced by the co-creative quadruple helix innovation model where users have an active role too, in all phases of the innovation, from the early ideation to the co-creation of solutions. Secondly, the ecosystem drives for multi-disciplinarity rather than clusters, which tend to be quite monolithic (Bror Salmelin, 2015).

When the global crisis disrupted the markets and the world economy, Portugal experienced an economic and financial scenario delay, leading to a strong increase of the employment rate. Similarly, not only this European country faces this scenario and, it should be more like it across all Europe and OECD countries as well.

The rise of the middle class in China, Brazil and India among other countries, the challenges on the employment and the future of work in the context of automation, poverty reduction, water and climate change represent just a shortlist of very good reasons to investigate and to discover innovative solutions to answer the world global questions and to design from the scratch new business models that address environmental impacts.

High-tech industry, entrepreneurs, civil participants, and academia (quadruple helix) should not only discuss the facts and concepts but also collaborate together under common platforms of R&D for advancing new innovation applied economics, policy experimental modelling and technologies.

In open and participative innovation processes, ecosystem participants experience multiple gains—business can develop the scalable product and service solutions that users want, the public sector can provide effective and affordable solutions to regional challenges, citizens share ownership of the specific, often highly personalized solutions they need, and universities can actively contribute knowledge and reap new knowledge and insights in return (Markku Markula & Hank Kune, 2015).

• New ideas;
• Cross-disciplinary interaction;
• Insight to new research and innovation approaches;
• Seed from new collaborative projects across boundaries.

MIST2015 is not only following the traditional academic conference approach but also, we are specially determined to create the time and space for interaction and creativity for the future actions thus, not so much focused on reporting from past.

We are compromised in creating the "MIST" to develop an environment for the "open science" prioritizing the cross-cutting themes of modern research and innovation methods hence highlighting impactful research and capturing the demand side attention and interest as well (policy-making).