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I-mpressions from the Lisbon Council 2010 Innovation Summit

Posted by I-Blogger on 08/03/10

At her speech to the Lisbon Council’s 2010 Innovation Summit last Friday, the EU’s highly charismatic and enthusiastic Chief Innovation Officer, Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn laid out her vision of transforming Europe into an “I-conomy”, connecting and speeding up innovation all along the whole policy chain from research to retail, building a functional single market for innovation and tearing down cross border barriers to IP and VC.

She advocated a broad-based concept of innovation with implications for the economy, for education, energy and for government. “Indeed, innovation is not limited to the private sector. It can – and must – happen in schools and hospitals, crèches, community centres and care homes. In an age of fiscal austerity, we must get more for less from our public sector.” More attention should also be paid to other forms of innovation, such as business model or management innovation, design and marketing, and services innovation.

She defended the 3% R&D target, but also called for the development of an indicator to capture research and innovation performance. The new Research and Innovation plan that is currently being drawn up (the dossier used to be with DG ENT but has now moved to DG RTD), and to be discussed at the informal Competitiveness Council in July, and to be presented to EU Heads of State in September, will take account of this and will be refocused on the grand challenges facing our society, i.e. climate change, energy, food security, health and an ageing population.

She also mentioned the ‘European Innovation Partnerships’ highlighted already in Barroso’s 2020 paper, published on 3rd March, which are thought as actions “to speed up the development and deployment of the technologies needed to meet the challenges identified”, i.e. climate change, energy and resource efficiency, health and demographic change. According to Barroso’s blueprint the first of these partnerships will include: ‘building the bio-economy by 2020′, ‘the key enabling technologies to shape Europe’s industrial future’ and ‘technologies to allow older people to live independently and be active in society’;

Also on the panel:…

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EU, EU institutions, EU programmes, English, ICT, Innovation, Knowledge
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Hospitals of the future

Posted by I-Blogger on 18/02/10

ERRIN event invitation: “Hospitals of the future: care, sustainable development and regional advantage“

Date: 2 March 2010, 9.00 – 16.45
Venue: South Tyrol EU Office, Rue de Pascale 45-47, 1040 Brussels.

While we are all familiar with hospitals and demand high quality healthcare, the hospital itself is in many cases an institution that remains largely unreformed. Hospitals and healthcare are a fertile ground for innovation across a broad spectrum from the use of new medical technologies to organisational methods, the use of ICT as well as new approaches to deal with the environmental dimension, e.g. medical waste, energy efficiency.

This event serves to set the scene for a wider discussion within the ERRIN Health group and with other stakeholders on this issue. We will present and discuss regional case studies with health and innovation experts and Commission representatives.

Please note that due to limited seating capacity, participation is restricted to Officer and Head of Office level or equivalent. More information, agenda and registration (pl. register until 26 February)

The event is part of a series of public events (ERRIN Mind Fora) organized by ERRIN in 2010 to reach out beyond the ERRIN memberships and to other Brussels-based stakeholders to showcase good practice of ERRIN members and discuss cutting edge thematic and policy issues. Learn more about these planned ERRIN events

EU, EU projects, English, Innovation, Regional cooperation, regional development
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Going green after Copenhagen - from Brussels to Beijing

Posted by I-Blogger on 29/01/10

This week we had a kick-off meeting in Brussels for Ecolink+, an eco-innovation project supported by DG Enterprise under the umbrella of DG Enterprise’s Eco-Innovation Platform (Europe INNOVA/CIP). In this project ERRIN is partnering, among others, with Eurada, EBN and two expert consultancies in the area of innovation management and early stage investment, Meta-Group and Europe Unlimited. The ambition of our consortium is to make this project a true reference point for eco-innovation at European level.

This is going to be a project that will help eco-entrepreneurs to share their experiences, refine their business model and improve their internationalisation strategies. We will liaise with a number of leading and emerging green economy regions in Europe to showcase successful support actions for eco-innovation (e.g. pro-active cluster management or public procurement) and to identify and network those companies (creating a “Club of 100 top eco-innovation companies with high growth potential”) that have the most promising technologies and business plans. A call for ERRIN members to put themselves and their companies forward for this action will be launched soon. This will be a great opportunity for ERRIN members to promote their strategies and actions for green economy and give their eco-innovation entrepreneurs a boost.

Within ERRIN these regions cooperate in our Energy/Climate Change Working Group that meets regularly in Brussels. They met this week to discuss, among others, our planned event on “Smart regions” at the Sustainable Energy Week, which will take place between 22 and 26 of March. This will be in many ways a follow-up to earlier work of the group that has led to the publication of an ERRIN statement in the run up to Copenhagen that emphasized the role of regions in creating research and innovation friendly environments and illustrated this with examples of regional excellence in delivering on low-carbon technologies.

Concerning the messy reality of post-Copenhagen and realising that the guys at the top can’t fix it for the moment, I believe that such a bottom-up push via smart local/regional strategies towards greening industries and new eco-innovation technologies and services is getting ever more important.

Related to this I would like to quote from a recent IHT article on this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos that said that even though the long-term trend is towards clean energy, in the short- and medium term many hurdles exist, one of them being financing: “Even before Copenhagen, many manufacturers of renewable energy equipment … were under pressure to shed jobs and close factories because of the economic crunch…and a lot of clean-technology start-ups were unable to secure venture capital. Meanwhile, relatively low prices for fossil fuels last year diminished the urgency for finding alternatives and endangered the development of relatively expensive clean energy production.”

On the one hand this leads to lock-in effects of continuing investments in old and polluting technologies, one the other it makes clean-tech less competitive. As long as the market incentives are low, many clean-tech companies, therefore, rely heavily on public sector initiatives and funding, concludes the article, quoting a G.E. executive who said that “Post-Copenhagen, there is a need for stronger cooperation between private enterprise and government, and we’ll now deepen efforts at cooperating with regions that control huge procurement budgets and with cities that also really spend money on innovative technologies.”

In the meantime, a veritable race is going on between emerging economies and the West to achieve leadership on low-carbon technologies. While China was not ready to compromise in Copenhagen, its state-run economy with its centralized industrial policy is investing heaps of cash into renewable energies (apart from planning to build three times as many nuclear power plants in the coming decade as the rest of the world combined), while the West is still bogged down from an economic crisis caused by greedy bankers that once again have their bonuses for excessive risk-taking flowing in, like it was business as usual.

China will surpass Spain this year as the No. 3 country in terms of wind power installations, behind Germany and the United States. But mind you this is not about saving the planet, it is about economic leadership and leapfrogging Western competitors to become as dominant in these technologies as in manufacturing, thwarting European dreams of capitalising on its first-mover advantage. Some fear that while much of the research and development as well as engineering on green technology — the engine for innovation — are moving to China to co-locate with the green-technology manufacturing that is already there, Western companies fear they are kept out of lucrative contracts.

The Chinese are, of course, as legitimately interested as anybody in these jobs and industries of tomorrow. Renewable energy is already 100.000 jobs in China a year. On the other hand with their massive economies of scale and low labour costs Chinese companies are able to offer renewable energy equipment increasingly competitively helping to get the cost of renewable energy towards being on par with fossil-fuel energy, and, thus, making ambitious renewable energy goals more likely to be achieved.

But this market is not only about producing stuff like solar panels and wind turbines, it is a hugely diversified market including waste and water management, energy efficiency, sustainable construction, and everything that’s aimed at creating more innovative and efficient processes and services reducing environmental impacts of production and consumption. It’s huge, it’s rapidly growing and in many of these areas European companies are still in the lead providing jobs and growth for the regions they locate and cluster.

A quest for direction after Copenhagen

Race is on to develop green, clean technologies

China Leading Global Race to Make Clean Energy

Nuclear power expansion in China stirs concern

As China Rises, Conflict With West Rises Too

China builds high wall to guard energy industry

The Great Industrial Wall of China

EU, English, Innovation, Regional cooperation, Research, regional development
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A new EU management generation - cooperation vs. turf

Posted by I-Blogger on 22/01/10

I apologise for my long absence. Recently I have, of course, followed the Commission hearings, at least for those of the new Commissioners that are most interesting from a regional research and innovation perspective, which is what I am focusing on in this blog.

Clearly, this was a great moment for the European Parliament and for European democracy. One MEP quoted by Euractiv said that “we need a bit more than warm words”, which is perfectly right, of course, but I think we should give our new EU CEOs a bit of time to prove their credentials. Let’s see how they translate the willingness to cooperate and the management competence and grip of their future dossiers they demonstrated during the hearings into concrete action. A Commission insider, I spoke to last week, said he hopes this will lead to the emergence of a new generation of managers that is more collaborative instead of focusing on their departmental turf only. However, there is also scepticism, whether political will be enough and it remains important that the MEP’s follow up on this to see what concretely can be achieved at a service level.

On the individual Commissioner hearings, I hope that the proceedings will be out soon, so we can study the oral examinations in more in detail. There was, of course, Ms. Georghean-Quinn, the designated/new Research and Innovation Commissioner, who had a very convincing performance and showed herself clearly in the driving seat, raising the hopes that there will be much more coordination on innovation issues between the different and overlapping portfolios in the future.

Equally convincing was Regional Policy Commissioner Hahn, former Austrian Minister for Research, who stressed the need for the EU’s regional policy to be of benefit to all regions in Europe and who proposed a pro-active urban policy, treading in the footsteps of a former Regional Policy Commissioner, Ms. Wulf-Mathies. Ms. Hübner, his predecessor and Chairwoman of the REGI Committee, applauded him on this, said Euractiv. Most importantly he vowed to bring regional policy goals in line with the ‘EU 2020′ strategy, spending more SF on into innovation, research and education.

Another strong candidate, Günther Oettinger, former Premier of Baden-Württemberg and new Energy Commissioner, also stressed the importance of regions in his hearing. He promised to make energy efficiency and renewables key priorities for future EU funding, both key areas where regions have an important role to play, also in boosting eco-innovation and in creating markets for companies, and related growth and jobs.

Needless to say the green economy was all over the place in these hearings. Designated Enterprise Commissioner Tajani focused on this issue, but also on the need for better access to finance for SMEs, which is a red-hot issue after the banking crisis. SMEs were also mentioned by Ms. Georghean-Quinn in view of getting them more involved in the Research Framework Programme, for instance by cutting red tape to make it easier for them to get involved and benefit from the EU’s R&D spending.

Clearly, if we want to really tackle the innovation deficit of Europe’s SMEs, regional aspects become quite important. It is not the nation state that is responsible for supporting SMEs, but it’s really the regions. And while basic research and big industry has a strong lobby in the FP, which we see, for instance in the annual thematic Work Programmes, which set the funding priorities and actions, where according to an expert I spoke to you still don’t see much research funded that is close to industry, one wonders about the regional and SMEs lobbies. It looks like it’s high time to shape the future FP to better meet their needs and include a stronger regional dimension, for instance by promoting programmes like Regions of Knowledge (which does not seem to have a strong lobby either, although it’s a great, but underfunded programme for building regional R&D excellence and driving regional research and innovation clusters).

To anchor this blogpost, I would like to quote outgoing Enterprise Commissioner Verheugen (or his speechwriter): “Innovation cannot be organised by decree. It comes from people, and only people — scientists, researchers, entrepreneurs and their employees, investors, consumers and public authorities — will make Europe more innovative. But they do not act in a vacuum. They act with a mindset and in a framework which either discourages or incites them to enter unknown territories.”

EU, EU institutions, EU programmes, Energy, English, Innovation, Knowledge, Research, Structural Funds, regional development
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Barroso walks the talk on innovation policy coordination

Posted by I-Blogger on 30/11/09

In announcing his new Commission Team President Baroso has walked the talk by setting out a combined Research & Innovation dossier, a clear sign that the future will see more integrated policy-making in view of innovation. In the interest of a broad-based innovation agenda, it is vital that this is a truly cross-cutting competence that works across several departments.

The new Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn has served as the justice and tourism minister in Ireland’s government, and has worked at the European Court of Auditors since 1999. The fact that she is from Ireland, which has been quite proactive in developing a knowledge-based society through research, is generally seen as a great asset.

Another lucky choice is the appointment of Austrian Research Minister Hahn for the job as regional policy commissioner, which bodes well for a regional policy post-2013 that does more to invest in the future and help improve the research and innovation ecologies in the regions.

However, one swallow (or in this case two) does not make a summer, as the proverb says. Much will depends on the willingness of the EU Member States to subscribe in theory and practice to Baroso’s vision of integrated policy-making across levels of governance and to find meaningful arrangement for policy-coordination and benchmarking as outlined in his political guidelines and in the consultation paper for the EU vision 2020.

Or as Ann Mettler of the Lisbon Council Think Tank aptly put it, “the EU 2020 agenda needs a much improved governance and ownership structure, as well as a new modus operandi that will credibly embody the innovation and renewal that is the very foundation of this strategy.”

It goes without saying that regions need to be fully integrated into this new ownership structure, since they play a crucial role in making Europe more innovative both through the elaboration of regional innovation strategies, stimulating and supporting triple helix interactions, e.g. through cluster management, and as territorial delivery points for EU policy and funding programmes.

So far regions are not really prominently mentioned in the EU 2020 consultation paper (only in view of the necessary active support of all stakeholders and “take up across all the regions of the EU” but not as key delivery points for the strategy). Also the proposal to effectively abolish the competitiveness objective in the Structural Funds (in the meanwhile withdrawn draft communicationb on the EU budget review) did not help to brighten the regions up …

UPDATE 10 December: I just learned that the European Commission’s research directorate general is to take over the 4-billion-euro Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme in the next Commission, which will be very important, of course, to bring the research and innovation funding streams closer together and streamline research and innovation funding in Europe.

EU institutions, English, Innovation, Knowledge, regional development
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From socialisation of debt to socialisation of knowledge

Posted by I-Blogger on 28/10/09

I would like to share this inspiring and thought-provoking presentation with you.

What’s it about?

Prof Luc Soete, Director UNU-MERIT, Maastricht, Member DG Research Expert Group sees a new trend and challenge to technology and innovation policy: from the political obsession with technological competitiveness to a new global view in which access, diffusion and effective use become the central elements. He, thus, sees as strong rationale for European versus national research policies.

But he also said that “if issues of effective governance at EU level are not addressed as an issue of absolute priority, the crisis shock might actually go the other way: questioning increasingly the valued added of Community research and leading to a future ERA that is based much more on MS’ national efforts at attracting research talent within their own borders.”

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EU, English
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Join the ERRIN Mind Forum

Posted by I-Blogger on 27/10/09

Dear friends of innovation. You are kindly invited to join our ERRIN Mind Forum on 18 November 2009 at VLEVA (Liaison Agency Flanders Europe), Kortenberglaan 71, B-1000 Brussels.

Background to the event:

Europe’s economy is slowly coming out of troubled waters and what some have described as ‘a perfect storm’. However, it will not be enough for its leaders to simply determine Europe’s present position and patch the sails. There is a clear need to readjust its navigational instruments.
The current debate on the EU’s post-Lisbon economic strategy is about steering towards sustainable growth, a clean and green economy, long-term competitiveness and prosperity and sustaining the European way of life for generations to come. This is the perfect opportunity for ERRIN, the European Regions Research and Innovation Network, to initiate a debate on the right course of action towards full economic recovery and competitive regions fit for the knowledge economy.

Our speakers

Danuta Hübner, Member of European Parliament, Chair of Regional Development Committee

Ziga Turk, Secretary General, Reflection Group on the Future of Europe

Gerard De Graaf, Head of Unit, Strategic Objective Prosperity, European Commission, Secretariat General

Mike Tremblay, Innovation, Research and Technology Advisor, London/Toronto

Mikel Landabaso, Head of Unit, Thematic coordination and innovation, European Commission, DG Regio

Jean David Malo, Head of Unit, Regions of knowledge and research potential, European Commission, DG RTD

Andrew Davies, Head of Unit, Innovation and Competitiveness, Regional Competitiveness and Governance Division, OECD

Plus: Speakers from ERRIN regions presenting regional flagship strategies and actions

Detailed conference programme

To register please send an email to communication(at)errin.eu, subject space: “ERRIN MIND FORUM”, until 6 Nov. 2009

EU, English, Structural Funds
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Lisbon and the reality check in our regions

Posted by I-Blogger on 27/10/09

Dear friends of innovation. Let me share this article with you. I wrote this piece for ‘Projects Magazine’. Your comments are welcome.

Lisbon and the reality check in our regions

The Lisbon agenda, i.e. the goal set at the Lisbon Spring Council in 2000 to transform the EU into the world’s most competitive economy by 2010, was in many ways a wake-up call for the fragmented policy-making of the EU and the compartmentalized approach to much of its economic development agenda. Since 2005, its focus has become oriented towards jobs and growth, while the follow-up and coordination of policies were monitored much closer, e.g. through annual implementation reports of the Member States.

Lisbon was extremely helpful in getting the EU to focus on policy priorities and starting a process of better policy coordination. However, it has also helped to bring the regions more into the centre of considerations of how to best deliver EU policies for research, innovation and competitiveness on the ground. There can be no doubt about this: regional know-how in preparing the right place-based policies on innovation and research, is both crucial and necessary, if the EU wants to make real progress on its goal to become the leading knowledge-based economy in the world.

From a regional perspective, where all the EU’s goal-setting and related policy-making converges and gets its reality check through the actual policy delivery on the ground and the related interactions between the stakeholders, this article highlights some of the issues at stake about the EU’s RTD and innovation policies that are currently being discussed within ERRIN.

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EU, English
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Survived the Open Days, ready for the European Innovation Summit at the EP

Posted by I-Blogger on 11/10/09

Survived another edition of the Open Days, the annual must-be-part-of-it carnival of the regional policy community in Brussels, where hordes of regional delegates descend on Brussels in search of data, information, knowledge and wisdom and for a bit of socialising with the likeminded. While EU funding is the driver, the ultimate gain is knowledge. „We are in the knowledge not the funding business“, I concluded speaking at O6C13 (“Capitalization and knowledge management for effective European territorial co-operation”), a workshop co-organised with John Walsh of the innovation unit of DG Regio.

I was alluding to my impression that programme managers in the TC programmes often seem to be more preoccupied with correct financial performance of projects than the ultimate quality and the knowledge produced, so a stronger focus on managing the knowledge flows all along the programme/project cycle would do some good. We looked at some good practice and promising initiatives, such as the “Keep” database of INTERACT and the thematic poles of URBACT and I presented shortly what the challenges are for European networks such as ERRIN in terms of better documenting and making available all the formal and tacit knowledge exchanged.

And what better place to speak about the need for better management of our knowledge flows than the seemingly chaotic Open Days with their overkill of competing events. To me the Open Days always had a paralyzing effect. There is so much stuff going on at the same time that I would have had to cut myself in pieces to follow all I am interested. So this is really about setting priorities. It helps to be a speaker because then you don’t have to register for the events and can engage in seminar hopping.

Innovation was written all over the event and a lot of workshops addressed the topic in on way or the other. I have to admit that I used to be a bit critical in the past of the quality of some of the events I had been visiting at the Open Days and of the overall organisation. But in its 7th year I get the feeling that this event has really matured into a great show and, what’s more, a good mix of quantity and quality of events, while there is still room for improvement, such as allocating more time for discussion and less for presentations. I think our workshop was a good practice in that respect with John’s excellent moderation skills limiting us speakers to their allocated time and drawing the audience in for debate.

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EU, English
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Sun and bytes kill coal and steel: A transformational agenda for Europe

Posted by I-Blogger on 08/09/09

Introducing a very inspiring EurActiv Stakeholder Workshop today on “What Programme for the Next Commission?” (thanks, guys!), EurActiv Publisher Christophe Leclercq pointed out that there has not much been debate yet on what will replace the Lisbon Agenda and whether that will be a much broader agenda than hitherto. Well, that’s bound to change with a number of recent and forthcoming policy initiatives:

Commission President Barroso has just published a 41-page policy agenda, laying out his policy priorities for the next five years and his thoughts for an integrated vision 2020, which he would like to implement, should MEPs endorse him for another term on 16 September, which they are said to be likely to do. Also a draft of the European Innovation Action Plan is expected to be published at the end of this week, and the Commission is planning a public consultation on Post-Lisbon for mid-October, which should all stimulate a lot of debate amongst stakeholders, and, hopefully, the media and general public.

At the EurActiv stakeholder workshop there was much discussion about the need for a new “narrative” and “transformational” agenda addressing the internal and external challenges the Union faces with a medium- to long-term trajectory, which should also be more inclusive in terms of engaging national-level policy-makers, stakeholders and the public.

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EU, EU institutions, EU programmes, English, Future EU, German, Innovation, Introduction, Structural Funds, regional development
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