Stepping up demand-side innovation policies inevitable for Europe

With promising results stemming from the Lead Market Initiative, we need to urge a more effective and extensive use of demand-side innovation policies in Europe. That was one the conclusions from the policy seminar organised by the Polish EU Presidency in co-operation with the European Commission's Enterprise and Industry DG in Warsaw on 26-27th October.

Policy makers, industrialists and other innovation practitioners from all over Europe used the seminar to take stock of the Lead Market Initiative's pilot experience and envisioned a future of demand-side innovation policies and the European innovation environment.

Demand-side innovation policies are important policy instruments aiming at increasing the demand for innovations, improving the conditions for the uptake of innovations or improving the articulation of demand. Their potential is widely recognised and actively promoted. New insights into the recent trends exploiting this potential are given by the INNO-Policy TrendChart report Demand-side Innovation Policies, which has been released in occasion of the seminar.

The seminar showed that industry and policy makers converged on a number of central points:

• There is a strong consensus over the fact that without effective and co-ordinated demand-side innovation policies, Europe will find it hard to survive in the tightening competition over future business investments.

• Growth of new markets and businesses was considered more likely to be achieved with the help of a coordinated initiative on innovation policies than with using different research and innovation instruments separately, as has also been confirmed by the recent evaluation report on the Lead Market Initiative.

In order to accelerate the uptake of innovations, linking research and market needs through for example the planned European Innovation Partnerships was considered essential. Moreover, responding to the societal challenges by for example encouraging the public sector to reinvent its role as an innovation engine is - and should in the future be - in the focus of lead market initiatives and innovation partnerships.

The discussion on potential future lead market areas and actions is now launched and will be followed by a green paper and a public consultation early 2012.

TrendChart thematic reports:

http://www.proinno-europe.eu/inno-policy-trendchart/page/thematic-papers

The European Lead Market Initiative:

http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/innovation/policy/lead-market-initiative/index_en.htm