Improving Governance in European Innovation Policy

Submitted by Administrator on 9 February, 2010 - 10:35

Nov 26 2009

Event Date:

26 November, 2009 - 10:00 - 27 November, 2009 - 16:00

Venue:

Representation of the State of Baden-Württemberg to the EU, Rue Belliard, 60-62, 1040 Brussels

The 9th PRO INNO Europe INNO-Views workshop “Improving Governance in European Innovation Policy” took place on November 26th and 27th in Brussels to discuss the rationales, challenges and opportunities to improve governance for innovation policies at European level. In order to make the ambitions of the EU 2020 strategy happen participants agreed that both horizontal and vertical coordination of policies in support of innovation needs to be significantly improved.

Participants stated a clear need of increasing efficiency of innovation policy activities and reducing complexity of the existing programme landscape in support of innovation at regional, national and European level:

Starting point for governance and programme design must be the innovators' needs: no-wrong-door principle at front office (no matter how the structure and multi-level governance looks like on the back-stage) and simplification of access to innovation support (e.g. by EU-wide harmonised and uniform application forms).
Innovation policy governance must be constructed to match the aims and priorities pursued.
Innovation policy must combine and synchronise both regulatory activities and support activities (governing policy mixes).
Innovation policy must be clearer on its objectives and focused on impact (not on input).

One of the participants summarised her message to be taken from the workshop: “Governance means to set priorities (and accept that not everybody can be made happy) due to limited resources. Without focus no impact can be achieved!”