Here you have a part of the article that I wrote in late 2010 and early 2011 for the journal Nota de Economia. It was published in its number 100, in the first quarter of 2012. I think you may be interested in having the perception on European innovation policy at that time.
At the beginning of 2010 the basic features of the Europe 2020 strategy were approved, with 5 objectives and 7 flagship initiatives. One was ‘the union for innovation’. The spirit of this initiative was summarized, at that time, in early 2010, with this list of ideas:
- R&D and innovation are considered the basis for economic growth. Europe has problems in this area. It is suggested to strengthen the knowledge base in Europe. But the investment in higher education is low and there are barriers to the circulation of talent. Obstacles to the mobility of researchers within the EU must be removed.
- The construction of the European Research Area, which involves creating networks, collaborations and critical mass in strategic areas, is needed. Also reducing fragmentation and duplication. Resources must be assigned to priorities. Europe proposes selective strategies, a selective allocation of resources to projects and regions.
- Europe also wants to complete the major research infrastructures, jointly between several Member States.
- European universities are uncompetitive at the global level. They have insufficient funding and also an allocation funding system which distributes the funds excessively homogeneously between all the universities. The universities also have inadequate governance systems, a low relationship with the private environment, and little autonomy. It is necessary to modernize them.
- Research and innovation are two concepts totally relate. Ideas should be brought to market. But the university-business relationship is weak and there is no effective market for technology transfer. The European patent is also pending.
- Science and innovation must address the major social challenges. Europe 2020 suggests which these big challenges are.
- The main cause of low European productivity is the low R&D investment of the industrial sector. Industrial R&D investment in Europe is concentrated in sectors of medium-high technological content (and not in sectors of high technological content). The knowledge-intensive European industrial sectors are small and made up of SMEs. We need to create and grow R&D intensive sectors.
- European education does not emphasize entrepreneurial culture and innovation and there is little funding in startup and scaleup phases.
- Innovation is seen in European policies in a broad sense: open innovation, user driven innovation, social innovation, non-technological innovation and organizational innovation. Also the cultural and creative industries are innovation.
- The public purchase of technology stimulates innovation and standardization procedures facilitate technological interaction. But the fragmented European market acts as a barrier to innovation.
- Europe has great differences between Member States in terms of investment in R&D, university institutions, innovative activity and productivity. The differences are even more remarkable at the regional level. Policies should consider these differences. It is intended to adjust Europe 2020 to each country and region and define territorial objectives, and to follow up with reports and indicators.
- Europe wants a European strategy for international cooperation in research and innovation, not individual international strategies, for each Member State.
The strategic approach of “the union for innovation” was based on four basic ideas: (1) a focus on the societal challenges, (2) coordination and collaboration with the Member States, (3) orientation towards the entire innovation value chain, understanding innovation in a broad and collaborative sense and 4) the participation of all agents and regions, each with its strengths.
“The union for innovation” made an original proposal and impact. He proposed that the regions adopt the concept of an Intelligent Regional Specialization Strategy (RIS3). Europe considers that its states and regions have been little original, little different, when defining strategies of competition: they have repeated what other regions did in the past. This has led to an overemphasis on the promotion of new sectors based on science, without some of the regions having had the basis to make this type of bet. Resources have been sparsely distributed; many research centers have been created, but they are not very competitive on a global scale. The consequence has been equality in the knowledge base in Europe. Equalities have been created, not inequalities which should be understood as positive, as concentrations of global excellence. The regional specialization strategy was intended to be an alternative to the equal distribution of available funding in Europe. It was expected to bring more diversity between European regions.
The idea was also related to the concept of large clusters of global impact. In its implementation form, the idea found inspiration in general purpose technologies or facilitating technologies, whose fundamental characteristic is its generalization capacity, to leave the sector where they were created to move to different economic sectors and generate opportunities. The Commission suggested specific enabling technologies that could improve the competitiveness of European industry: nanotechnology, microelectronics and nano-electronics, photonics, advanced materials and biotechnology. The new strategy implied, on the other hand, a need for coherence between the innovation policies and the rest of the policies of each region, since it started from the strengths of the territory. With RIS3 the regions are looking for total differentiation, they must identify market niches in which they can have competitive advantages. RIS3 supports regional strengths in strategic areas from the awareness of competitive advantages in a context of global competition. It implies a deep knowledge of the region itself, but also of those that are the competition. The strategy of intelligent specialization should:
1) Be based in the place, evaluating strengths and weaknesses and considering the history of the region and its surroundings. Activities in other regions, especially neighboring ones
2) Have strategic resources proportional to the ambitions of the region
3) Look for a balance between specialization and diversification, remembering that excessive specialization will expose the region to the risk of change
4) Look for complementarities with other regions, especially those that focus on the same enabling technologies, even with different capacities.
5) Be evaluated and supervised by experts and anticipate structural changes, reviewing priorities. Follow-up should include retraining strategies.
6) Be accompanied by other measures to support higher education and vocational training, innovation and SMEs, etc. The targeting of resources in areas of intelligent specialization should not interfere with the development of a broad human capital base.
The regions can use a series of tools and actions to promote their growth and differentiate themselves. They suggested, for example:
– Clusters
– Entrepreneurship
– The business support environment. Here it was said that incubators and science and technology parks could play a fundamental role.
– The third mission of universities
– The KICs of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology
– The creative and cultural industries
– The public purchase of innovation
This approach implied a change in the way universities and research centers were viewed in the territories. Traditionally, it has been considered that public R&D ends up, over time, influencing its business environment in several ways: through students who are integrated into companies, through technology transfer, through the creation of companies, etc. This way of thinking has meant that in recent years all territories (cities, regions) have wanted a university or public research infrastructure. “The union for innovation” contains a more evolved idea: it is public research that is influenced by the innovation activities in its environment. From this point of view, there must be a critical mass of technological companies, private research laboratories and service companies as a precondition for ensuring that a research university will have a significant effect on regional innovation.