Czech Republic: Resolution about the approval of the National Innovation Strategy
With the Resolution No. 714 the government approved the National Innovation Strategy of the Czech Republic (NIS). Its conceptual basis and goals will be used inter alia for actualising national research, development and innovation activities up until 2015.
The main objective of the NIS is to strengthen the importance of innovation and the use of high technology as a source of competitiveness and increase their corporate responsibility (CR) benefits for long-term economic growth, to create jobs required more qualified workers and improved circumstances for the development of the CR.
According to the ministries that established the NIS: "The National Innovation Strategy is a joint document of the Minister of Industry and Trade and the Minister of Education, Youth and Sports. The Strategy follows the recommendations of the analysis on the competitiveness and innovation potential of the Czech Republic prepared by the Technology Centre of the Academy of Sciences within the so-called CZERA project.”
In an effort to have a more transparent and more concretised picture about the symptoms and opportunities decipherable in the Czech economy, the analysis on the one hand used statistical data from OECD and the Czech Statistical Office. On the other hand statistics available in the database of World Economic Forum, and documents prepared by the National Economic Council of the Czech Government (NERV) were of great importance together with the programme of the National Policy of Research, Development and Innovation for the years 2009 - 2015.
The present National Innovation Strategy is based on the recommendations of the European Union's innovation strategy document emphasising that Member States should support innovative activities based not only on knowledge, excellent research, quality education and training professionals, but also on innovation activities carried out by various industries.
Therefore, the NIS is divided into four main parts dealing with:
- excellent research,
- cooperation between the private sector in research and knowledge transfer,
- encouraging innovation and business people as bearers of new ideas and initiators of change,
- and specific measures for the priority axes of the NIS are further elaborated in the project plans within each pillar of the strategy of international competitiveness.
This proceeding fully reflects the recognition saying that the basic prerequisites of successful innovation in the market are new skills and entrepreneurship. In the long term, one of the most important prerequisites is the continuous development and intensity of the basic research. This is the main source of new knowledge, which extends the available technological options for useful innovation. Excellence in the basic research is a prerequisite for high-quality applied (oriented) research, as well. Top results of basic research in many cases stimulate the development of applied research directly. Not to mention that applied research results often define challenges for basic research.
Excessive emphasis on promoting research without developing and improving links with the business sector to ensure exploitation of research results in practice may pose a significant risk of NIS. NIS therefore considers the stimulation of collaboration among different actors in various kinds of fields as part of the basic needs.
Since innovation emerges first in peoples (workers) minds, then it can be manifested at firms level, NIS is based on Schumpeter’s thinking emphasising that the entrepreneurship is the basis for innovation. As a consequence, NIS concentrates on firms in various kinds of sectors. The novel part of the NIS is the recognition of misleading aspects. For example, due to the high multiplier effect on new jobs in high-tech sectors, the policy still has a bias towards these sectors by ignoring barriers and economic importance / potential of innovation in low- and medium technology industries. The consequence of excessive focus on high-tech is a great attention to applied research at the expense of other important tools (e.g., in the internationalization of companies, foresight, etc.).
References/further readings:
NIS (in Czech language): http://download.mpo.cz/get/44911/50470/582602/priloha002.pdf
About the CZERA project: http://www.isvav.cz/projectDetail.do?rowId=LM2010010
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