A recent initiative between the EU and the US is to start a Transatlantic Innovation Dialogue as part of the Transatlantic Economic Council. This Council works on better mutual recognition of existing regulation. But the new emphasis is on future Innovations - such as electric cars, smart grids, eco-efficient or nanotech-based products - which will need development of new standards and regulations. The Dialogue will therefore be about building cooperation on future innovations. This should help build more predictable framework conditions for new technologies and solutions, and help avoid future regulatory conflicts.

On the 25 January we organised a meeting with stakeholders from business, consumer and standards organisations to collect views on this initiative and think about priority topics for the Dialogue. Ideas put forward included co-operation in grand societal challenges like climate or health and legal issues such as intellectual property rights and privacy enhancing.

What do you think about this initiative and what topics the EU and the US should co-operate on?

On the 16 and 17 December, the Swedish EU presidency formally closed the European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009 with a conference entitled Create Innovate Grow. However, many of the participants did not want to view the conference as an end point. “Closing is the wrong term to describe this conference. This is not an end, but rather the end of the beginning.”
This statement reflects the general view of those present at the conference, namely that this European Year has been a great success and something to build upon for the future. Despite the fact that the Year had a very limited budget, the messages conveyed have attracted tremendous interest, also from players not usually engaged with the European level. In total, more than 1000 events have been organised under the banner of the Year and registered on the website; the real number of events is thought to be much greater.

See also the article on the conference on the website of the European Year

What then explains this success? The word “innovation” is often associated with research, high tech manufacturing and big business. The message of the Year is that innovation is much more. Innovation is fresh thinking transformed into value in any area, and the result of creativity. Creativity is a universal human trait, something that we potentially all have in us and that can be nurtured. Moreover, creativity and innovation is needed to solve our society’s most pressing problems. It concerns all of us.

If we want to make innovation more inclusive, more citizen-driven and more attractive, we need to think about how to further develop the link between creativity and innovation policy:

How can we – the Commission, policy makers and other stakeholders – sustain and benefit from the momentum and the movement created by the Year?

What should be the next steps? What more could be done to make innovation and innovation policy making more inclusive?

What do you think?

We enjoyed reading this new e-brief by Ann Mettler at the Lisbon Council with a number of concrete suggestions for new indicators for the EU 2020 agenda; from input to output targets and to EU level goals backed-up by country specific targets. For Innovation, she suggests four new targets for Europe: productivity growth; number of people who switch jobs; number of high-skilled immigrants; and birth/death rate of companies.

EU innovation policy and implementation takes place in a complex cross-departmental and multi-level governance setting. The problems of the current situation include:
- confusion due to the wide range of a) centrally managed EU funding programmes (FP7, CIP, LLP, EIT, LIFE, etc.) b) shared-managed funds of which over €86 billion will be invested until 2013 at national and regional level into innovation (ERDF, ESF, Cohesion Fund, EFF, EAFRD), c) trans-national government initiatives for coordinating national research activities (EUREKA, COST …).
- a lack of clear leadership and distribution of competences with trade-offs that need to be made between an overload of coordination work or a lack of consistency with conflicting policy messages, “re-inventing the wheel”, lack of ownership and “silo” thinking of national and EU level policy-makers. The centrally managed innovation related programmes have over 20 management committees to decide on the funding allocations. In the field of eco-innovation alone there are more than 6 such committees active.
- fragmented innovation support system in Europe with difficult inter-locking of support measures for innovators at regional, national and EU level,
- lack of synchronisation of funding activities with regulatory activities (environmental, health and safety regulations, standardisation, intellectual property protection, procurement and state aid rules, etc.) or other policies that are not considered as part of the core innovation policy themes (employment, consumer protection, etc.) can lead to a sub-optimal innovation environment for enterprises and other innovation actors. The Lead Market Initiative is a step in the good direction.
What are your suggestions for an optimal EU innovation policy governance system? Who should be the main actors and at what level? How should the EU innovation programme landscape look like? Shall we try to develop a better governance system starting with specific topics, such as climate change and aging society?

These were the topic debated at the INNO-Views workshop on innovation governance on 26-27 November

Public procurement is worth some 16% of GDP but public procurers typically buy low cost, low risk solutions rather than innovative ones that would really improve public services. We brought together a group of experts and policy makers for a two day workshop to explore what could be done about this. Some participants thought that changes are needed in the public procurement directives or that procurers need more guidance on how to buy innovative solutions. But others argued that this would not lead to real changes in behaviour. The recent initiatives by the Commission to support transnational networks where procurers can learn from each other and generate stronger purchasing power, were widely seen as a way forward for the future. Finally, countries like the UK and the Netherlands reported successful experience with “precommercial” procurements based on the US “SBIR” scheme that offer contracts for companies to develop and test new solutions to specific problems identified in hospitals, public transport, care and other public services. A question for the future is whether the EU should support this approach, and if so how.

What do you think?

The Innovation Unlimited site was started by a panel of business innovators set up by DG Enterprise and Industry to develop new ideas for future European innovation policy. The panel felt that the comments and ideas of others would increase the relevance of their report. The site was managed by the DG Enterprise and Industry innovation policy unit. We were impressed by the quality and creativity of the comments made on the site and also by the potential for this form of communication to improve our policy making. So we have decided, with the agreement of the panel, to take over this site ourselves and to use it to post items that are live topics in the debate on European innovation policy. This is a particularly exciting time as we prepare for a new European Innovation Act that is due to be presented in early 2010 and set a new agenda for EU innovation policy. We will be posting various blogs over the coming months and really look forward to your comments and ideas.