Which priorities for Community research policies post 2010? by Martin Curley
October 5, 2009Discussant session 2.2
Whilst the subject of this conference is the European Research Area, careful consideration needs to be taken of linkage to adjacent areas and competencies.
Investing in research is an investment in future value creation, but this value creation can only be achieved if we have joined up thinking and connectivity between research and innovation policy and processes. There is a saying that research turns money into knowledge and that innovation turns knowledge into money. In Europe we need better integration and connectivity between macro research and innovation processes and better collective and individual accountability from the research community for value creation.
In the context of the Knowledge Triangle (education, research and innovation) Martin Schuurmans Chairman of the EIT has stated that entrepreneurship is the glue that holds the Knowledge Triangle together and in wholehearted agreement I advocate Europe needs to take a much more aggressive posture towards entrepreneurship education and particularly towards lowering the barriers to enable risk taking and stimulate high expectation entrepreneurship. A particular weakness in Europe is the low percentage of public procurement which is spent on innovative and new solutions. This must be a key focus for policy makers now and post 2010.
The Aho report (Aho et al, 2006) on an Innovative Europe has important recommendations that need continued support. Creation of innovation friendly markets, with increased structural mobility as well as fostering of a European culture of innovation are crucial. This year’s European Year of Innovation and Creativity is to be commended and should be the first of many European wide initiatives which promote and stimulate innovation. A multi-year roadmap of awareness and support initiatives should be maintained. We should however recognize the enormous value of the Framework Programs as an open innovation vehicle and indeed as a key integration tool in the broader European Project. A key output of the Framework program research should be the logical and conceptual designs for the future electronic and services infrastructure of Europe. We need an overarching research agenda which directs and focuses research activity towards common goals. At Intel Labs Europe we have articulated an Innovation Agenda called Digital Europe which calls for performance of research and advanced proof of concepts in many area of European society (Digital Health, Education, Business, Government etc) and the subsequent synthesis of the learning’s and artifacts created into an architecture of a Digital Europe with associated design patterns which could enable rapid diffusion of solutions and rapid assimilation of benefits.
We need to continue to better join up policies, incentives and instruments which link education, research, innovation and entrepreneurship. Macro measures and targets for research spending such as BERD are useful but far from sufficient. We need to actively measure conversion efficiency from input spend to output value. Unless we have output measures which measure the cumulative impact of research we will get sub-optimal conversion of money into value. Andy Grove, founder of Intel was often quoted as saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” and I think this particularly applies to the research process. Whilst output measures such as research recognition, citations, and patents are all useful the most important measure of output “value” is most often neglected. Europe needs new measures for conversion of research spend into value and collectively and individually the research ecosystem needs to feel and be held accountable for delivering this value. Proof of value delivered could become a key requirement for the successful conclusion of a research project whilst the definition of “value paths”, likely trajectories for value exploitation should be identified early in the research process.
On a different level the world may need a new socio-economic model, one which does not depend on expectations of continued growth in a world of finite resources. European researchers can and are taking the lead in areas such as “high tech, low carbon” but we need collective engagement to move to a new paradigm for our socio-economic model. Much evidence points to the fact that we are moving towards the knowledge economy but this seems to be being accomplished with continued consumption of finite resources. We in the European Community need to be brave and lead a global transition to a new sustainable economic model, perhaps an equilibrium model as described in the Meadows (1972) et al report “The Limits to Growth”
In research we also need to pay attention to innovations in research philosophies. In my own field of information systems, Behavioural science has been the dominant research philosophy in the past numbers of decades but the emergence of Design Science promises to deliver much greater value to practitioners in the field. Despite the market demand from practitioners, behavioural science research outputs continue to dominate. We need mechanisms which help systematically recognize paradigm shifts and can overcome inertia in the broader research body to enable faster reaction to these shifts. This is all part of a process of achieving a better balance between R&D push to Market pull, or perhaps better described by achieving a balance between supply side and demand side research and innovation.
The accelerated adoption of open innovation and the changing implications for IP need to be considered carefully. We are seeing a new form of open innovation emerge, perhaps better called open innovation 2.0 where there is involvement of all actors in the innovation ecosystem, companies, suppliers, academics and even end-users and end-user communities, come together to share experience, information and best practices, and build strategic alliances and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
The OISPG through Vallat (2009) argues Europe needs to better capture the potential of societal and simultaneous technical innovation in a systemic manner.
The implications for this in the context of research policies need to be carefully considered and acted upon. Building a pan-European Innovation ecosystem with directed actions for innovation capacity building, amplifying research and innovation inputs and alignment mechanisms to align spending with key priorities will be critically important in achieving best outputs possible from European research.
The Lund declaration is a major step forward in moving from a rigid thematic approach to a problem based solving approach focused on major societal problems such as energy, aging, congestion. As the majority of innovative solutions come from a stated need, we need to better balance the portfolio between curiosity driven/thematic spending to the Grand Challenges (Energy, climate change, ageing society etc) research. Eco-innovation must be pushed to the fore where solving environmental problems meeting commercial potential can create win-win models that enable a virtuous cycle of research/commercialization funding.
Some closing thoughts and questions. Similar to the idea of ICT enabling frictionless commerce how can we move the ERA to a vision of frictionless innovation? Can we establish a pan-European infostructure that enables much faster innovation and exploitation of results? Additionally how can we create intellectual supercollider constructs which enable the rapid interaction of people, ideas, opportunities and cultures to create new solutions and inventions quickly? How can we capitalize on collaborations such as DEISA to increase capability and access to high performance computing research infrastructures? How can we encourage and stimulate further triple helix innovation which can enable and accelerate step changes in research and innovation outputs.
References:
Aho, E et al, 2006 Creating an Innovative Europe
Vallat, J. 2009 Intellectual Property and Legal Issues in Open Innovation in Services, Open Innovation and Services Policy Group (OISPG)
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