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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]