INNO-Nets - Better policies and instruments in support of innovation in services

Innovation in services is a key driver for competitiveness and productivity growth. Any significant improvement in innovativeness and economic performance in Europe requires major contributions from enterprises delivering services. The ambitious targets of the Lisbon agenda can hardly be reached without increasingly dynamic and competitive services. Productivity in services is still relatively low in Europe. In order to close the productivity gap with the US and other main competitors innovations in services play a key role.

With an increasing evolution towards a knowledge economy, new innovation policy challenges arise. Most current innovation support mechanisms are still biased towards technological innovation and therefore miss out to a large extent the needs of other forms of innovation. In particular services innovations receive relatively little attention. They are in many respects different from innovation in manufacturing, thus requiring new policy approaches in their support.

Services innovation is a multidimensional and multilayer phenomenon which calls for new types of innovation support beyond the traditional technology push approach. Users are more actively involved in the development of innovative services which raises different challenges as addressed by established innovation support mechanisms, such as incubation, technology transfer or IP support. Member States and regions have started to develop and implement new policies and instruments in support of service innovations but still more needs to be done in this respect.

As the development of new or better mechanisms in support of innovation i n services is still in its early stages, great scope for mutual learning and exchange of experience exist at European level. A first step in this direction was undertaken by the IPPS project funded under the PRO INNO Europe® initiative which mapped existing innovation policies in support of service innovations and identified a number of areas for trans -national cooperation at policy level. This project was followed -up by a “European Services Innovation Memorandum” signed by 9 national and regional ministrie s and innovation agencies from Finland, Estonia, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden and Greece in December 2007.

The new Innovation Platform on Knowledge Intensive Services under the Europe INNOVA initiative (KIS -IP) has the ambition to practically develop and test forms of business support for innovative service companies in a number of sectors and to provide horizontal support to them. It is important that the lessons learned from the KIS -IP will be leveraged into new policy concepts that are widely implemented in as many Member States as possible. Furthermore, it is still a challenge to ensure stricter neutrality of existing innovation support mechanisms with respect to different forms of innovation. This action shall make progress in both respects, by bringing together policy makers from different Member States who share the interest in better policies in support of innovation in services.

With this in mind, a new “INNO-Net” on “Better policies and instruments in support of innovation in services” shall be launched through an open Call for proposals under the PRO INNO Europe® initiative. Based on previous work under PRO INNO Europe® and Europe INNOVA, specific areas have been identified where progress should be made as a matter of priority.