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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

All the more recent growth theories are placing innovation at the heart of what drives creativity and growth in countries and regions. However, the available data shows that regional growth is very much a self-reinforcing phenomenon, leading to a huge amount of inertia, a fact that flies in the face of a lot of regional [...]

I got my crash-course in public procurement this week at a DG INFSO workshop on “Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP)”. Now while this sound like a boring bureaucratic nightmare, it’s actually really exciting stuff, at least if you are interested in boosting research and innovation and making Europe a more competitive knowledge-based economy.
At the workshop I listened [...]

I got a great lead from a Euractiv interview with Professor Bengt-Ake Lundvall, an innovation researcher at Aalborg University on HR management as key to innovation for highlighting the importance of the right framework conditions or ‘regional ecologies’ for the European Research Area and for driving Europe’s competitiveness.
My acquaintance with this concept [...]

Cohesion Policy makes up the largest chunk of the EU budget. It is of tremendous importance to put the EU on a growth and innovation trajectory and to align national and regional development policies for the knowledge society.
To help the future orientation of cohesion policy towards regional R&D and innovation needs, ERRIN, the European [...]

I have had the opportunity to participate in a Pro-Inno workshop on Open Innovation last week. Great initiative by the organisers, my compliments to DG Enterprise. Here are some thoughts:
Open innovation (OI) has become an integral part of innovation strategies and business models of companies in recent years and has inspired policy makers to stimulate [...]

The 2008 European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) published today shows the EU is making progress in its innovation performance preceding the financial crisis. In parallel to the EIS, the 2008 Science, Technology and Competitiveness report also published today provides for the first time an overview of progress from 2000 to 2006 in both EU R&D investment [...]

Yesterday I had the pleasure to listen to EIT Board Member Prof Karen Maex, vice-rector of KU Leuven, at an event on the Eindhoven High-Tech Campus and today we had an ERRIN policy briefing with Thomas Sanders of the EIT Task Force in DG EDUC, who briefed ERRIN members on the state of play of [...]