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 [...]

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 [...]

Innovation is a vital component of regional competitiveness and a key driver to help regions escape the current economic crisis. Innovative regions are also a key factor in attracting companies to locate in the EU. All the more reason for ERRIN, to explore new thinking on improving innovation processes and discuss how Open Innovation [...]

Euractiv reports that Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt thinks the Lisbon Agenda has failed in putting Europe on the map for the world’s most innovative region. Sweden will hold the EU Presidency for the second half of this year starting 1st July and preparing for a ”bumpy ride”.
“Even if progress has been made it must [...]