Graciela Nava Guerrero,
Rafael Silveira
This section investigates the actual relevant trends and initiatives within the Permanent Innovation sub-system on Texel. What characterizes Texel and the Texelaar? What are their ambitions? What activities take place?
Identity of the island
The identify of the island is characterized by its small scale community. This is an advantage for Texel, because it allows communication between politics, municipality, entrepreneurs and citizens. However, it is challenging to make citizens feel engagement with local politics (source: Texelse Courant). The municipality start becoming more transparent by updating their activities on Twitter. For tourists, the island is attractive due to its diverse landscape and culture (source: Jacco Boersen in TU Delta).
Identity of Texelaars
Texelaars are innovative people, though individualistic (souce: TU Delta). Their innovativeness comes from the history in which they had to solve their own problems. Being independent has developed as a core value within the Texel culture, according to Pieter de Vries, Policy Adviser to the community in Texel, which shows in the large number of self-organised associations for music, sports and more (source: Texelse Courant). Finally, Texelaars are good networkers, because from history they need good connections with the mainland for importing goods and ideas (source: Deconstructing Texel).
Ambition
The municipality of Texel has formulated a vision to become completely energy and water self-sufficient by 2020. So far, they move in the right direction for reaching this goal, for example by installing energy-neutral street lighting (source: Gemeente Texel) and by formulating a policy for water management in collaboration with stakeholders (source: Gemeente Texel). Regarding solutions for these challenges, Pieter de Vries says Texelaars prefer local solutions and they want to be in control of their energy and water supply.
Activities on Texel
Many sustainable initiatives emerge on Texel, such as a potato storage factory running on solar energy, energy-neutral houses and car dealership with a sustainable organisation. From history, Texelaars actively innovate and the trend is to develop sustainable innovations.
Texel manages to attract many tourists to the island each year. Among tourist-entrepreneurs they have a good local network (source: Deconstructing Texel). This network collaborates with the tourist information centre, which these days functions pro-actively and innovatively, for example by setting up the app ‘Wadsapp’ and broadcasting national advertisements on television.
Knowledge creation takes place on Texel as well, for example by ECN and NIOZ with research about respectively energy and ocean-related topics, with a focus on fishing, salination, monitoring the wadden sea and agriculture.
Conclusion
Texelaars have already been innovative, but this innovation is more and more focussing on sustainability. As always, Texelaars are happy to solve their own problems and be independent from the mainland. The ambitious vision of the municipality supports both of these trends.