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 [...]

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 [...]

As the economic and environmental crises deepen, there is a growing recognition that many aspects of our lives need to be reinvented. Politicians routinely call for the “redesign” of society, and urge businesses to “innovate” their way out of recession. This readiness to embrace change — even radical change — coupled with advances in science [...]

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 [...]

One surefire way to improve the EU’s innovation performance, entrepreneurship and competitiveness is to upgrade university-business links. To strengthen the role of universities in promoting economic competitiveness, regional regeneration and creating innovation hubs for business and the community is one of the priorities under the Lisbon Agenda. Universities should also be instrumental in developing a [...]