With the Green Paper consultation reaching its close on 20 May, this will be the final blog post.

One of the frequent comments that have been made so far in the online questionnaire and written responses is the need for EU research and innovation programmes to be open to non-mainstream projects. Many respondents feel that this is important to capture the most dynamic, innovative projects and participants, including SMEs and new entrants to EU programmes.

How could this be done?

A common suggestion is to make the calls for proposals less prescriptive and more open. This would allow applicants with different approaches to submit their proposals without being ruled out of scope. Related to this, many responses have suggested supporting a portfolio of different projects within an area to form an “ecosystem” where projects interact and the most promising ones receive further support. This could echo the approach used by venture capitalists, where a portfolio of high risk investments mitigates the risk of individual failures.

Others point to the success of schemes like Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) and the FP6  New and Emerging Science and Technology (NEST) which have the specific aim to identify and support non-mainstream projects. It is suggested that these types of schemes are used more widely in future.

Some respondents have proposed more radical solutions, such as introducing a random element in the selection of which projects are funded.

The Green Paper asks whether new approaches to supporting public procurement of research and innovation should be introduced in future EU funding.

The public sector represents a large share of EU economies, and public procurements account for some 17% of GDP. But very little of this procurement is used to buy R&D services or innovative products or services compared with other regions, such as the US. This can be said to represent a lost market for innovation as well as a lost opportunity for improving public services.

This weakness was recognised in the Innovation Union flagship initiative, where one of the key action points is for Member States and regions to set aside dedicated budgets for pre-commercial procurements and public procurements of innovative products and services to create procurement markets across the EU starting from at least €10 billion a year, with an EU support mechanism to help implement these procurements.

Pilot actions have already started under the current EU programmes. Calls have been launched to support the implementation of pre-commercial procurement of ICT R&D and a new scheme and pilot call is being developed to support procurement of innovations.

Should these pilot actions be developed in future EU research and innovation support; are there other approaches to be considered?

One of the key dimensions of the success of the Innovation Union will be the sustained participation of young innovators and potential innovators. To discuss this issue, we invited Kumardev Chatterjee, President of the European Young Innovators Forum, to present their vision.

On the 13th of April at the European Parliament, EYIF will present its ’Transforming Ideas to Actions, Roadmap 2011 – 2012′ event hosted by the Youth Intergroup, where it will outline its recommendation for the shared-risk collaborative approach between Europe and its youth to build and sustain Europe’s ‘Innovation Capacity’, by empowering young innovators to engage in a significant, transformative role in Europe’s innovation renewal. Full details are available on www.eyif.eu

The role of Youth in addressing Europe’s innovation emergency (by Kumardev Chatterjee)

Young Europeans need to have access to and participate in initiatives that enable them to turn ideas into the growth and social progress which will build European renewal.  However, there are significant challenges, both societal and structural restricting their participation. These challenges in combination, serve as a potent ‘cocktail of barriers to European innovation’.

Societally, Europeans have grown increasingly  risk-averse in the last 30 years…

Young people find that risk taking, innovating and following one’s dreams are neither encouraged, nor appreciated or supported. Parents, teachers, peers encourage and sustain a culture that favours professional achievements over ‘playing with ideas’, paycheck security over ‘dynamic work’. Young Europeans are encouraged to eschew risks and follow well-trodden, ‘safe’ paths to jobs, security and prosperity. These cultural and societal aspects have led to a whole generation of risk-averse young people, who though full of ideas, shelve them in the pursuit of secure and ‘socially respected’ career highways. Innovation is left behind on the nondescript side-roads.

Structurally, Europe has been slow to encourage and reward risk-taking. ..

Regional, national and European programmes are more often than not structured on similar top-down approaches, i.e. supporting ‘institutionalised innovation’ in research laboratories, networks and industrial innovation platforms. These top-down approaches are slow to adapt to both fast changing trends in the digital world and the hyper-connected, creative, community world, young people live in. Equally, by their very nature they are tailored to support specific ‘thematics’ and entail significant overheads. Young people who simply have an innovative idea are consequently excluded due to the complexity, and limited accessibility of these instruments.

On the legal-regulatory side, European frameworks, specific legislation and general practice in a variety of fields from start-up taxation to IPR are counterproductive for innovation as they significantly hinder both the ability and the morale of young innovators to develop their ideas into concrete products and services.

The way forward

At the very outset, it is necessary to recognise that meeting the European challenge of engaging young people into a renewed culture of innovation, requires uniquely European solutions.

This vision imposes certain criteria, requiring potential solutions to :

- reflect an European outlook in form and content – solutions and practices that work elsewhere cannot be simply adopted frame-by-frame, instead the whole canvas of solutions need to be specifically tailored to European contexts and perspectives;

- be designed and driven by young people themselves – achieving credibility amongst youth and consequently gaining traction within young people’s communities requires youth to be engaged from the start in framing the solutions;

- be flexible, elastic and responsive to both the dynamism of youth communities and their changing needs and contexts – today’s ‘innovation hot topics’ are easily outdated tomorrow

At the European Young Innovators Forum, we believe the vision for solutions should be a uniquely European pact on shared risk taking, where both society and citizens converge. This vision encompasses two distinct and converging perspectives:

- European Societal Commitment to Innovation : EU coordinated action to encourage citizens engagement via reduction of barriers and improvement of access, facilities, platform and funding;

- Citizens Engagement in EU Innovation : Societal coordinated action to change attitudes to innovation, entrepreneurship i.e. encourage an European Innovation Attitude, Lifestyle, career

We believe that solutions aiming to fulfil this vision need to address four specific areas:

- Improve Access to Innovation, particularly for citizen innovators through adequate communication of innovation narratives, success stories, programmes and possibilities, using bottom-up approaches.

- Increase Facilities for Innovation by fostering collaborative, community driven, online environments for ideas, facilities, demonstrators and funding. In short, ‘Digital Innovation Democracy or DID’.

- Reduce Barriers to innovation take-up, particularly the shake-up of existing policy, legal and regulatory frameworks to make them ‘Innovation friendly’ and communicating the changes to young people to motivate them. Equally, increase funding opportunities for innovation by encouraging a better risk-taking attitude from funding sources. Funding bodies need to embrace risk as reward.

- Enhance Participation of citizen innovators and encourage take-up of Innovation by challenging traditional cultural and societal aversions to risk-taking and entrepreneurship. This aspect necessitates the facilitation of citizen to citizen community building, mobility and mentorship.

One of the questions in the Green Paper is about introducing “inducement prizes” as a new approach in EU research and innovation funding. To discuss this point, we invited David Osimo, a co-organiser of the upcoming “Prize Summit” to give his thoughts. David sees prizes as a new trend in research and innovation funding which can reach out to innovators, reduce administrative burdens, and help turn research results into marketable solutions. But he also warns that they are not a panacea: they only work in certain conditions and there is a risk of “prizes overload”. We would welcome other comments.

Prize-based competition for funding research and innovation: flavour of the day or sustainable policy solution? By David Osimo

We live through important times in the context of innovation policy in Europe. Just after launching the flagship Innovation Union, the European Commission recently opened the consultation (http://ec.europa.eu/research/csfri/index_en.cfm ) on the future research and innovation support measures. The wider macro-economic context is even more unstable, between the freeze in public spending and the ever increasing speed of innovation, with new players (both countries and companies) rapidly growing and others rapidly declining, and totally new products and markets being created from scratch often from unexpected sources.

In this context, we need to look at the current policy measures and ask ourselves: how can we get most out of the funding instruments for innovation? We need to look not only at the funding level and the research priorities, but at HOW the funding instruments are designed.

Evaluation studies and experts agree on the key issues to be addressed:

- the capacity to involve the real innovators, rather than the best proposal-writers

- the administrative simplification both for government and for recipients

- the capacity to turn research results into marketable solutions

These are not new, but there is now an emerging trend that could help addressing them. In the last years, mostly in the US, there has been an increasing usage of prizes, rather than grants. Companies and governments have set up “challenges”, where the financial reward goes not to the best proposals, but to the innovators who come up with the best working solutions.Examples are the DARPA challenge (http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/index.asp ) for the self-driving car, or the recent Australian prize for the best algorithm to identify patient at risk (http://www.heritagehealthprize.com ).

This trend is becoming extremely powerful and structured, not just a one-off exercise. The US government has created a dedicated platform, called www.challenge.gov , to enable the organisation of competition by any government, and has promulgated the America Competes Act(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_COMPETES_Act ) to simplify and streamline the organisation of challenges by government. In the private sector, not only challenges are being organised by the largest corporation, but there are now many companies who have as core business the organisation of prizes for both government and business.

The results are highly promising precisely to address the three issues listed above: these competitions are able to attract the best innovators, even those traditionally not engaged with government funding. They reward concrete results, not proposals. They don’t require complex control systems. They are able to attract a far superior number of high-quality results than traditional grant systems.

I was personally involved in the design of the Flemish INCA award (http://www.inca-award.eu/INCA09 ): with a total prize of only 20.000 Euros we received 35 innovative working applications, ranging from Internet of Things to smartphone apps.

Yet we must not consider prizes a panacea: they work only in certain conditions, for example where barriers to entry are low and innovation is not capital-intensive. They have to be properly promoted and designed. It is not clear to what extent they can upscale or there is a risk of prizes overload. Prizes tend to overlook basic research, which can lead to fundamental but unexpected results. Intellectual Property has to be clear, and in some countries such as Italy there are administrative barriers to the organisation of prizes.

In conclusion, prizes offer opportunities that the current debate around EU innovation policy should take closely into account. But we need to have a clearer picture of the state of the art, assess the impacts and the lessons learnt, understand the potential for upscaling and the risks. These issues will be discussed at the Prize Summit (http://theprizesummit.com ), a high-level conference in London next April the 8th. Practitioners from all over the world will come together to share their knowledge and hands-on experience on the opportunities and limitations of prize-based competitions.

What is clear is that today there is no one-size-fits–all solution: governments have to increasingly experiment with innovation policy and continuously re-design their measures, rapidly learning from the experimentation. Prizes are the “flavour of the day” but it’s only by concrete experimentation that we’ll understand the implications and be able to properly design the “next generation” of policy instruments.

Following the welcome post from the Commissioner, we would now like to start up the discussions. The Green Paper asks the question “should new approaches to supporting research and innovation be introduced?”, with the suggestions of public procurement of innovation, and inducement prizes. So we are planning to have some discussions on these new approaches over the next couple of weeks. But beyond that we are in your hands. Please let us know if there are questions that you would want to see discussed: where you have ideas, where you think the EU should do more, less or differently; or where you would simply like to know more about what the current thinking is.

At the European Council meeting on 4 February 2011, the leaders of the EU’s Member States were unanimous: investment in education, research, technology and innovation is a key driver of growth. They asked the Commission to bring together the full range of EU research and innovation funding instruments and initiatives within a common strategic framework that can fund excellent ideas from the research stage all the way to new products and services.

This Green Paper proposes some radical changes to how the EU will fund research and innovation beyond 2013, to raise the excellence of EU research, boost our industries’ competitiveness and tackle the major challenges faced by our society. This new approach should make it easier to apply for EU funding – with simpler rules, greater coherence between different parts of the programme, and a one-stop shop for getting information and applying for funding. I believe these changes will make a huge difference and help make every euro count.

Now we need to make it happen. With the consultation on the Green Paper you have the chance to provide your ideas on how Europe should fund research and innovation.

Some of you will already have experience of this, for example in the research Framework Programmes or the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme. I would like to know what we can do better.  If you are thinking about applying for funding in the future, what would make the EU programme more attractive to you?

This blog opens the debate on the future funding of research and innovation. I hope that the debate will be lively and I am sure that it will be very informative. Europe is facing an innovation emergency. But if we work together we will achieve great things, and make the European Union a true Innovation Union. So let’s get down to business!  Thank you very much for your contribution.

Maíre Geoghegan-Quinn