Frequently Asked Questions

Ruta N uses the definition used worldwide, based on the OECD's Oslo1 and Frascati2 manuals. Innovation is defined there as “the introduction of a new or significantly improved product (good or service), process, marketing method or new organizational method in the internal practices of the company, workplace organization or external relations ”3. It also specifies the appropriate ways of measuring innovation that are used in most countries. 1 https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/manual-de-oslo_9789264065659-es https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/manual-de-oslo_9789264065659-es 2https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/manual-de-oslo_9789264065659-es 3https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/manual-de-oslo_9789264065659-es

In essence, Ruta N is a mission-oriented public innovation agency. In this type of institution, the central objective is to promote innovation as a transversal process of society that allows it to solve, from the correct application of CT+i4, its most pressing challenges. These missions are aligned with the SDG5 prioritized for our city. 4 Science, Technology, and Innovation 5 SDGs: Sustainable Development Goals. See: https://subinfo.github.io/new/ods/

To contribute, through innovation, to improving the quality of life of the inhabitants of Medellín. Most of the actions can be better described if they are specified in three main groups: attraction of talent, capital, and global companies to the city; development and strengthening of these elements in a new innovative business fabric, and finally in the generation of solutions to the city's challenges from the city's innovation ecosystem.

Articulate, Connect, Inspire and Catalyze the city's innovation ecosystem. Its mission is not focused on working directly on the innovation ecosystem, as is the case with a traditional public administration area. Ruta N seeks to ensure that the entire innovation ecosystem achieves the city goals that are necessary to contribute to improving the quality of life of citizens through innovation. Ruta N is a means and not an end.

Ruta N is a non-profit public corporation governed by private law. Its shareholders are the Municipality of Medellín, EPM Group and Tigo-UNE.

The governing bodies of Ruta N are: General Assembly of Associates and Board of Directors. The first is composed of the Municipality of Medellin, EPM Group and Tigo UNE. The Board of Directors is represented by the 4 basic actors of an innovation ecosystem: university, business, state, and citizens. 6 Ruta N is an indirect decentralized entity of the public conglomerate of Medellín. It has an internal contracting manual, an internal control area, and an external audit office.

An innovation ecosystem in any city or region is composed of companies, the State, the academy-educational system, and all citizens. It is known as the quadruple helix, after the intertwined shape of the strands of the DNA molecule.

In the past, people spoke of national or regional systems of innovation since they thought of a linear relationship with clearly defined inputs and outputs. This was true for several decades, especially during the industrial era. At that time, it was considered that knowledge was generated in universities and some research centers closely connected with them, and that through technology transfer processes it was taken to companies (market). In turn, the latter, when they had a new unresolved need, sought out these universities / centers to ask them to create the necessary technologies. This vision was very relevant at the time, however it was surpassed many years ago, since the speed at which the world evolves today requires multiple inputs and outputs of knowledge that go beyond this basic scheme, that act simultaneously and are not at all sequential in a population. in this scheme any person / institution can request a solution; and any other, if it has it, can supply it. This configuration is more like the way in which a biological ecosystem acts and not like a linear production chain, which is why we have been talking about innovation ecosystems for several years now.

Ruta N's resources come from several sources: First, there are the resources allocated to the city's CT+i Plan 2011-2021 7, with which all programs related to its mission work are executed. Additionally, Ruta N has managed national resources from royalties for Research and Development (R&D) in CT+i, which have been oriented towards the ecosystem of the city and the department. This amount has been the largest income of resources executed by the corporation. Ruta N has been selected as the best executor of CT+i royalties in Colombia according to the DNP 8 In all the programs executed by the Corporation, funding is also mobilized from all private actors towards innovation projects. Likewise, resources are obtained from national public entities and multilateral entities. The own resources generated by various Ruta N programs, such as the Landing program (attracting companies to the complex and other coworking areas in the city), have allowed the Corporation to cover almost all its payroll and general expenses for many years, thus allowing for operational self-sustainability. 7 Ruta n is a public entity monitored and audited by the corresponding local and national control entities. It has an internal contracting manual, an internal control area, and an external audit office. 8 See news in: https://www.rutanmedellin.org//es/noticias-rutan/item/%c2%a1fuimos-reconocidos-como-los-mejores-ejecutores-de-regal%c3%adas-en-innovaci%c3%b3n-del-pa%c3%ads.

The CT+i Plan is the city's public policy on science, technology, and innovation. It is “the roadmap for the development of innovation in the city”. This plan had a process of collective construction through 250 leaders from the quadruple helix of the city in 2011. The construction process was led methodologically by Ruta N. This plan selected the strategic markets: energy/renewables, life sciences/health, and advanced ICT, in which the most promising and profitable opportunities for new innovations that could be produced from the city are found, as well as the gaps that should be gradually closed by the city to achieve the goals in these selected markets. In 2012, the City Council adopted the CT+i Plan 2011-2021 as public policy and designated Ruta N as the leading entity that should lead it between 2013 and 2021. For this purpose, it allocated annual resources for those years from 7% of EPM's ordinary transfers to the municipal administration.

There are no exclusions. All sectors are included in the CT+i Plan, all can and should be stimulated to innovate. The CT+i plan chose target markets and not economic sectors. In the past, in the Industrial era, the strategy should be based on selecting economic sectors; today, in a knowledge era, the strategy should be based on choosing the world's target markets that can be more profitable and that can be reached from the innovations (application of new knowledge), that the city produces from all its economic sectors, and/or can produce soon.

No. It can be illustrated in another way. A company in the textile sector can obtain knowledge of nanotechnology in a learning community in the city's ecosystem and produce innovations, for example, a new fabric that, when a child wearing a garment made with it experiences a temperature increase, will clearly indicate that the child has a fever. It will therefore be an innovation from the textile sector, but oriented towards the Life Sciences market, where it will be more profitable for the company than what its traditional textiles regularly produce.

Since its creation in 2011, the CT+i Plan defined for Ruta N the task of keeping the plan up to date through the implementation of the regional observatory of CT+i. It is the observatory that indicates which opportunities are in force, in which markets, and which are the new gaps that must be closed in the ecosystem to achieve these objectives. Ruta N is permanently updating the contents of the observatory, together with many actors of the ecosystem, thus keeping the city's CT+i plan current. This observatory has always been available to all citizens and institutions, so that they can align their future strategic plans with the content provided from there 9. It should also be used and studied by all public institutions and by anyone who wants to propose new plans for the city based on TC+i. Currently, we are preparing the update of the CT+i plan for the 2020-2030 period, through the mission-oriented public policy methodology10 that defines the purposes of the city in a way that is close to the sustainable development objectives, aligning the entire innovation ecosystem to overcome the most important challenges of the city through CT+i solutions. This methodology will seek an active, continuous, and massive participation of all city stakeholders, 
connecting the knowledge of thematic experts with the perception, citizen understanding of the problems, as well as with advanced analytical tools and artificial intelligence, which allow keeping the plan updated in times that accelerate every day its evolution at great speed in the world. 9
This observatory has always been available to all citizens and institutions, so that they can align their future strategic plans with the content provided from there 10 See explanation here:
https://blogs.iadb.org/innovacion/es/por-que-impulsar-la-innovacion-orientada-por-misiones/

On the first floor are all the actors of the quadruple helix ecosystem, the second-floor entity works unlike them to ensure that they obtain in the shortest possible time the effect required by society; to contribute to improving the quality of life of citizens. It is from there where the actions already referenced in question 4 take place: articulate, connect, inspire, and catalyze what happens in the ecosystem, on the first floor. This scheme is one of the most successful in the world for public innovation agencies.

Most Ruta N's actions that are executed on the first floor are done in coordination with many of the corresponding actors. These actions seek to solve, through a specific and time-limited effect, a market or knowledge failure (Catalyze), create a new culture (Inspire), generate new synergies (Articulate), and achieve a greater city effect (Connect). This effect, by design, should be short, with a view to scaling exponentially so that it quickly becomes a permanent new capability or behavior of the entire ecosystem, and of all first-floor entities. Once such a result is obtained, the ecosystem assumes entirely that task, while Ruta N focuses on a new objective not yet achieved in the ecosystem (another gap in the CT+i plan explained in the answer to question 10). This explains why many of Ruta N's programs, despite having been successful, are no longer executed by the entity in subsequent years. The important thing is that the city has these capabilities and can move towards closing another gap that is still pending. 
Many programs implemented by Ruta N on the “first floor” correspond to stages of a strategy articulated from the second floor and may take many years to achieve their central objective. Hence the importance of having an independent entity that can set objectives and monitor them through management indicators, which can take many times longer than the traditional term of office of a mayor, governor, or president to be achieved. Science, technology, and innovation have proven to be the best tool to transform societies and improve people's lives, but their effects only become evident when working strategically along the same lines and given enough time for their effects to accumulate and take on the necessary critical mass in society.

All associations in specific sectors of the economy must strive to innovate to remain relevant, achieve and exceed the objectives of all their constituent companies and the purpose that gives meaning to their sectoral grouping. Ruta N has always sought to contribute and/or articulate its efforts in that same direction. Likewise, it should continue to do so constantly, with all the city's clusters in which its proposal has been updated with the current reality of the world and is adapted to what is expressed in answer 12, in relation to innovation, knowledge, markets and sectors.

The success of an innovation ecosystem is based on the possibility of multiple actors interacting in an organic and non-hierarchical way. Under this scenario, the public entities that make up the quadruple helix on the “first floor” of the ecosystem must be seen as actors, although part of their vital role corresponds to providing some of the necessary resources and stimuli from the public function. These entities must avoid the “temptation” of becoming judge and jury. Ruta N can thus maintain the confidence of the ecosystem as a specialized public actor, which is an asset of all and is not for profit, but which can also articulate all the public institutions that by their nature have to operate on the first floor. These institutions, whether municipal, departmental, or national, also have direct missionary obligations of action in the city.

Due to its independent nature, Ruta N can articulate actions that allow for long-term objectives in innovation, avoid unnecessary changes derived from short-term priorities of the public function and that the major strategic objectives, instead of being interrupted by changes in the public administration, find in Ruta N the appropriate support point to improve the splicing processes for the benefit of the city.

No, since it operates from a “second floor” as an articulator, which complements them and not as another entity on the “first floor” that competes with the existing ones. The correct institutional design of modern innovation agencies foresees this type of cases and that is why it is recommended that it should be public, but independent, that it should be a team that articulates with all of them, and that it should not compete by avoiding being on the first floor of the ecosystem.

Ruta N has developed several very valuable programs directly in the city's municipalities in conjunction with various departments of the local administration11 and should continue to do so in the future. In any of these cases, we must ensure that the first-floor action complements the action of the municipal administration but ensuring that it responds to the design of a strategic objective of disruptive change from innovation for the entire city, as is Ruta N's mission responsibility. It is most likely a mistake to employ Ruta N in direct actions, where it is not its field of action, only to complement coverage, when it can be used as the medium that activates the entire ecosystem and thus create exponential, sustainable changes for the benefit of all citizens of Medellin. 11 See examples here:
https://www.rutanmedellin.org/es/actualidad/noticias/tag/Comuna%20Innova http://www.innovacionsocialcolombia.com/comuna-innova/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUhzKJ0x79Y

The relationship between economic development and urban development has evolved in a surprising way over the last 20 years around the world. It is not the buildings that produce innovations, but the urban infrastructure of a city can boost, or on the contrary, deteriorate the level of innovation of a society. For all these reasons, the two processes are now closely interrelated. To modernize the capacities and knowledge of our society and gradually increase our level of innovation generation as a city, it was necessary in the last 6 years to attract 330 companies from 31 countries to settle in our region to innovate. The city's physical infrastructure for these types of companies, as well as the way in which they should operate, was not available in the Medellín of those years, and most of the people in these industries (construction, real estate, horizontal property, etc.) were still unaware of how this operated in the rest of the world. 
Without the development of this new type of infrastructure and associated services, external companies and our own that were already innovating (30% of the companies in the business “Landing” program are of local origin), would not have been able to settle or prosper in the city, as they have done so far. It was undoubtedly essential to create these infrastructures and, through them, to introduce other types of innovation to the city in these sectors. Incidentally, this has also changed the working culture of most of the companies in the city, as well as those in this business sector (more than 70 new coworking businesses have been created in the city in the last 3 years).
The objective of exponentially acquiring knowledge with the companies attracted to settle in the city, has been met and far exceeded, but also became a very appropriate source of self-sustainability (see self-sustainability aspect in question 9). This was also fundamental for acquiring other new capacities in the city, for its specialized technical communities. Medellin currently has more than 35 advanced communities in Blockchain, Analytics, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Programming Languages, and others, which actively bring together more than 30,000 people to continuously grow their knowledge and skills.

No. That action has not happened and probably will not happen in the future because of the way the world operates today. Tax reductions or handing out subsidies may have been an appropriate practice in the past, but certainly counterproductive today. Only when local or external companies that settle here invest in creating advanced local capabilities with our talent, can we think of contributing to that growth.

Absolutely. You can undertake without innovating, but you cannot innovate without undertaking. By promoting innovation, Ruta N is convinced that it generates the biggest and most powerful scheme to boost entrepreneurship... We make sure that this entrepreneurship is therefore of high impact, so that it quickly transfers socio-economic benefits to a large part of society and not only to the direct entrepreneurs of each proposal. In order to keep clear the objective of contributing to improve the quality of life of the citizens of Medellin, the goals cannot be focused on the number of special ventures produced (for example, unicorn-type companies12), since they do not guarantee a benefit to the entire population with their existence alone. We certainly want to increase the number of innovative ventures and therefore their impact. We are sure that this will soon lead to some Medellín companies becoming unicorns, which will be another success of the strategy, but it is not the primary objective of the city's innovation ecosystem. 12 See definition here:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/268414

No, and it should not be. On the contrary, it should work so that the city has many of them, with sufficient knowledge and resources. Something similar happens with accelerators, business centers, research groups, venture capital funds and the like. Ruta N's job should be to make them world class and increase their coverage to more citizens / entities every day, as well as the results they produce. Concentrating on a single entrepreneur or some of them would avoid being more effective with the systemic process required by the ecosystem of the city and would compete with the entities that do have that mission, which are specialized in it and with which we team up to maximize the results as a society.

It should be emphasized once again that what is important is not what Ruta N does, but what the city does. To achieve this, it is necessary that the resources of the CT+i Plan are delivered directly and fulfilled in the amount established by agreement 024 of 2012. In this way, Ruta N will be able to team up and achieve, together with all the entities of the city that focus on these issues on the second floor, a new qualitative leap, as big or bigger as the one that the current figures reveal is fortunately happening today in Medellín.

Ruta N's records show that the number of people served is very large, and almost all requests have been correctly processed. However, Ruta N needs to communicate more broadly and clearly the nature of its mission and its possibilities. The speed at which the Medellín ecosystem and the institution has grown, as well as resource limitations, have sometimes prevented this communication from being broader and more assertive with all citizens. It is a constant challenge and an enormous motivation for Ruta N to try to correct this type of difficulties. It is necessary to ensure that every citizen can be attended and correctly oriented towards the appropriate institutions, even if Ruta N's specific mission does not cover the requirements requested.

Not necessarily. When a region has very limited capacities in TC+i, only a few public actors and some entities promoting innovation seem to be the ecosystem, but an innovation ecosystem must go much further and make almost all organizations and citizens part of it. Medellín has advanced a lot in these matters, therefore, supporting the ecosystem must be a strategic process that must go much further in its conception and development. When there are so many communities and actors that it is difficult to fully identify them all, it will possibly be a sign of the maturity of our ecosystem.

Its function is to drive the actors of the ecosystem (including, of course, all other public institutions) to grow, to obtain superlative achievements in a short time through exponential behavior, and to propose and promote solutions promptly to the most urgent problems of citizens, as explained in the answer to question number 18.

No. Given its capacity to powerfully transform organizations and its effects, it would be a mistake to take it as just that. Innovation should be seen as a cross-cutting capacity of a society. Political leadership should foster innovation, first and foremost by promoting the generation of enabling conditions so that all people perceive innovation as the most appropriate mechanism for transformation, stimulating society to achieve this in a continuous and permanent manner.

As a lever, as a powerful tool for the local government to drive the whole society, reflected in its innovation system already articulated to meet or even exceed the goals that as a government/development plan have been proposed. The municipal administration must make its direct-action plans, but at the same time it must lead through Ruta N that the city's ecosystem is fully in tune with these objectives, propose and create solutions in parallel that will not be limited to the resources and people of the local, regional, or national public administration. This is the most powerful and modern way to achieve in a short time a better quality of life for the people of a society.

No. There is only one type of innovation, the one that generates value and transforms society for the better. Ruta N only supports a proposal as innovative when it is SUSTAINABLE, in all its aspects: socially, financially, and environmentally, based on the accepted definitions of innovation (see answer to question 1). They only occur when a change is generated in something that is adopted by society, either when a new product or service is acquired, or when new solutions to society's problems are found and successfully applied through innovations from public entities. In this scenario, all innovation is social: it comes from and towards society. Ruta N supports technological innovations, but also non-technological innovations that can create important socio-economic impacts for the city. The best way to be social is to be equitable and to direct the benefits in greater volume to the people who need them most, even if this often means that this action reaches them anonymously and systemically.

Only by the size of its impact. The more people who benefit from an innovation, the greater the effort Ruta N must make to make it a reality in our city. The greater its impact, the more social is that innovation.

As mentioned in the answer to question 15, TC+i is very powerful if in the past it has developed sufficient critical mass. In general, this only happens in some cities. It is therefore appropriate to challenge the ecosystem of a city, such as that of Medellín, to find solutions for semi-rural areas of the same city and other territories of the department and apply them in those territories until they provide the expected results. The definition and prioritization of these challenges, as well as the execution and evaluation of the solutions proposed from innovation, should be done by the leaders and inhabitants of these territories, but the resources to execute them should be channeled to the innovation ecosystem of the city, where exponential and effective world-class solutions can be articulated. It is not about replicating models, but rather about articulating connections and integrating the inhabitants into them. Ruta N is the best institution to maximize the results of this articulation.

There are many projects underway. In relation to the mission obligation, multiple initiatives have been articulated, which seek to find appropriate solutions to various current challenges of our society. It is worth listing some of them: Shared electric micro-mobility integrated to the mass transportation system. Digital transformation for the health sector to ensure its efficiency and effectiveness throughout the population. Possible solutions to the city's air quality challenge that are effective now and, in the future, depending on the city's economic growth Medellín Data City13. City economy driven by open data from public and private entities. To have abundant data so that entrepreneurs can design and propose new and innovative ways to solve our problems. Also enable Medellin to be one of the cities that provides more data to train new Artificial Intelligence models.
In conjunction with the above, two other projects are underway that are considered priorities within Ruta N due to their impact: ICT Infrastructure14 for competitiveness and equity: That every citizen of Medellín has the same digital rights and has access to the same ICT infrastructure, while the cost of these services is a maximum of 2% of their income: equity. Also, that with those services provided they can compete in a knowledge economy with any other person in the world: competitiveness. Medellin's talent for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 4IR.
To ensure that local organizations, and anyone in the world that locates in the city, can find the talent they require in Medellín, with the necessary skills, in the right quantities. Medellín has 524 thousand young people between 16 and 28 years old and we need to provide them with a powerful and complementary system to the current educational system to train 44 thousand young people in an advanced way, and with funding, and employ at least 19,000 of them in 4IR jobs by the end of 2021. We want to achieve that most of the 60 thousand young people in vulnerable conditions that the city has today, can find in this proposal a possibility of social transformation. We seek to provide a better present for these young people, while they, with their new skills, will provide a better future for the city. 13 There are currently two initiatives articulated from Ruta N for open data in the city. One with the metropolitan area AMVA:
http://datosabiertos.metropol.gov.co/story/conoce-el-portal-de-datos-abiertos and another with the municipal administration: MEData. http://medata.gov.co/.
The next steps include providing citizens with open data from private entities, using technologies such as OPAL: Open Algorithms. 14 ICT: Information and Communication Technologies. 14 ICT: Information and Communications Technologies.

As a cultural transformation machine that works to modify the mentality of society and enables it so that Medellín does not make the mistakes of the past in the present and in the future. That society maintains the ability to renew itself (permanent innovation), and that it builds a city based on a knowledge economy in an equitable and inclusive manner.

Unlike a city without an already articulated innovation system, Medellin has another set of tools that connect the actors of society in a different and complementary way to how the state traditionally does with citizens and other institutions. This allows it to propose more disruptive and rapid ways to act to be more forceful. It even allows it to enable private enterprises, as well as international knowledge and actors, which otherwise might not be able to be linked in these new innovations necessary for society. Proposing innovative solutions to these challenges is also Ruta N's mission.