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Partnerships for better innovation support
European Commission Enterprise and Industry
Year 6 - Issue 21 - March 2011
The newsletter of the Europe INNOVA initiative
Expert Panel on Service Innovation in the EU
The Rome finale SPECIAL EDITION The Expert Panel Final Event
Lessons from the KIS Partnerships > Page 6
Sectoral Innovation Watch
A Sectoral Innovation Watch Event produces New Insights > Page 9
The Expert Panel on Service Innovation in the EU handed over its final recommendations to Antonio Tajani, Vice-President of the European Commission with responsibility for Industry and Entrepreneurship, at a conference entitled ‘The Transformative Power of Service Innovation’ held in Rome, on 17 and 18 February 2011. “My message is that in Europe we need both strong manufacturing that builds upon technological leadership and innovative services that make our manufacturing even stronger and find their own markets worldwide,” Antonio Tajani said, when he received the Expert Panel’s report during the event, which was hosted by the Italian employers’ federation Confindustria. “The fight for the best talents and resources, like rare raw materials, is becoming ever fiercer. Europe does not only face strong competition through lower costs in other countries. The global economic battle is now
also about the best technology, the most attractive design and the most effective distribution and financial systems,” the Vice-President said. He also thanked the Chair, Allan Mayo, and the other members of the Expert Panel for their excellent work. In sectors like transport, logistics and tourism, innovative services are already changing how the European economy operates and they are bringing new jobs to the regions of Europe. However, the experts conclude in their report that a mind-shift is needed in Europe towards strengthening the role of service innovation. One of the key recommendations of the Expert Panel is to establish a European Service Innovation Centre (ESIC) to provide a powerful base for evidence and research on the effects of service innovation. Read more about the Expert Panel’s final report and conclusions on pages 2, 3 and 4.
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Service Innovation can really strengthen
European Innovation and Growth The work of the Expert Panel on Service Innovation in the EU has come to a fruitful conclusion. In four intensive workshops during 2010, the 20 experts worked together to deliver an inspiring case that would illustrate how service innovation could help Europe to get back on track and deliver smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.
The Expert Panel was established by DG Enterprise and Industry with a clear mandate to tie its work directly to the Europe 2020 Strategy. It was also expected to address how service innovation could provide solutions to wider societal challenges such as sustainable growth, the ageing population and the pressure on welfare services.
Mr Allan Mayo, Chairman of the Expert Panel and Vice-President Tajani
Its report entitled ‘Meeting the Challenge of Europe 2020: the transformative power of service innovation’ has just been presented to Vice-President, Antonio Tajani. In addition, to illustrate their findings, the experts have produced a collection of more than 20 encouraging examples of innovative businesses in Europe in areas such as tourism, transport, energy, health services, business support and banking. In the report, the Expert Panel made a total of 13 individual recommendations aimed at strengthening the policy framework in the following five main areas: 1. R aising awareness of the transformative potential of service innovation and its contribution to EU competitiveness; KEY RECOMMENDATION: that the European Commission establishes a European Service Innovation Centre (ESIC) to strengthen the links between policy-makers, business and academia and to help raise awareness of new developments and emerging opportunities related to service innovation.
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2. S trengthening political leadership at the European, national and regional levels; KEY RECOMMENDATION: that Member States review their strategies towards the use of Structural Funds and, in particular, develop measurable outcomes in relation to supporting innovative services.
3. B uilding new competitive business from service innovation and improving the agility of policy making to do so; KEY RECOMMENDATION: that the European Commission adopt established mechanisms for encouraging the development of new innovative services. The European Creative Industries Alliance may provide such a model.
4. D eveloping dedicated programmes in support of innovative services or opening up existing programmes that are biased towards technological innovation; KEY RECOMMENDATION: that the European Commission develop a Service Gazelles programme to support high impact gazelles in the EU.
5. Promoting the application of service innovation to meet societal challenges; KEY RECOMMENDATION: that urgent consideration be given by the European institutions to the selection criteria and governance of Innovation Partnerships (demonstrators) with a view to adopting this policy tool as a key driver of innovation and industrial policy in the EU.
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Two Authoritative Appraisals of the Significance of Service Innovation
Allan Mayo, Chair of the Expert Panel on Service Innovation in the EU
Reinhard Büscher, Head of Support for Industrial Innovation Unit at DG Enterprise and Industry, and Allan Mayo, Chair of the Expert Panel on Service Innovation in the EU and also Head of Services Policy Unit in the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, were interviewed during the final event of the Expert Panel in Rome, on 17 and 18 February 2011. The European Commission has put an increasing emphasis on service innovation, why is it so important now? RB: We all know that half of innovation is driven by research, which means the other half is not. At DG Enterprise and Industry, we wanted to explore how non-technological innovation, or service innovation, could be better promoted and channelled to support the EU 2020 agenda. Service innovation is very much driven by entrepreneurial spirit and needs similar attention to that given to technology-driven innovation, but this may require new approaches and instruments. The Expert Panel has presented recommendations that go beyond the traditional forms of innovation support, focusing on ways to mobilise demand and create new markets through innovation. Can you give some examples please? RB: Some forms of service innovation have a potential to change the entire value chain and
create new markets. This is what is called the “transformative power of service innovation”. iPhones or iPads, for example, are much more than technological evolutions. They are revolutionising the music or publishing markets, which brings new players into the game. The same happens right now in transport and logistics which take over more and more manufacturing functions. Services represent a larger part of value chains, which means that the border line between service and manufacture is becoming blurred. And with that, the battle for the dominance in markets has been re-opened. What is the potential of service innovation in today’s European economy? AM: Supporting an ageing population, tackling climate change or following the fast technological changes implies constant adaptations of markets and companies’ business models. Local services, business services and professional financial services are areas in which European productivity performance is significantly lower than in the US, and where
Reinhard Büscher, Head of Support for Industrial Innovation Unit at DG Enterprise and Industry
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efforts should be concentrated. Many areas can be transformed, improving their level of services to the customer such as better health services for an ageing population, or integrated logistics platforms in cities. Increasingly, the manufacturing sector is combining its products with related services to provide a more complete offer that matches the needs of its customers and users. Can you synthesise the key findings and messages of the Expert Panel? AM: In the Expert Panel, we found that service innovation, with a real transformative power, sits in between three pillars: infrastructures like broadband or waste management, the market framework with its standards and finance, and people and skills, including R&D. It is at the confluence of these three dimensions that decisive service innovation, such as cloud services, sustainability services or location services, can grow and make a difference. They can also reach the customer in improved ways, thanks to new business processes or interoperable standards.
Final Expert Panel Event: www.europe-innova.eu/ rome2011 Report of the Expert Panel: www.europe-innova.eu > Innovation in Services > Expert Panel > Publications
Case Studies: www.europe-innova.eu > Innovation in Services > Expert Panel > Case Studies
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After having analysed many concrete cases, the Expert Panel recommended a demand-driven approach, which implied raising awareness of the transformative potential of service innovation at European, and also at national and regional, level. Instead of a small-scale, prototype approach, we suggest ‘large demonstrators,’ which are near-to-market projects, bringing together industry, service providers, research institutions, regulators and users. They would identify infrastructure and new technology requirements, the need for specific standards including interoperable standards, opportunities for service transformation, barriers to progress, and skills needs. This will, of course, require strong political leadership. We welcome the Commission’s proposal, contained in ‘An Integrated Industrial Policy for the Globalisation Era,’ to establish a High Level Group on Business Services, which will align the range of policy tools to help drive change. Government’s role will also be central at regional level in improving the ability of less-developed regions to promote services and service innovation. We also encourage a better funding environment for service innovation, through a Service
Gazelles Programme together with measures to strengthen links between manufacturing and service firms. How will the work initiated by the Expert Panel continue? AM: We recommend the creation of a European Service Innovation Centre to strengthen the links between policy-makers, business and academics, to raise awareness about service innovation opportunities across Europe and to act as a central hub for expertise and authoritative analyses, sectoral and foresight reports and evaluations of support programmes. What is the overall reaction of the European Commission to the Expert Panel’s suggestions? RB: Our overall reaction is positive. With the report, the policy debate is moving to questions like “Which new markets can be built?” “What is the structural impact of service innovation?” and “How to use this impact to better address societal challenges?” The Expert Panel rightly reminded us that in order to exploit the full potential of service innovation, we should start from the needs to which they can provide solutions and this is exactly the approach of the large demonstrators. What is DG Enterprise and Industry intending to do in this field? RB: As the first step, and in compliance with what the Expert Panel proposed, two new alliances, bringing together policy makers in support of service innovation will soon be launched - one for Creative Industries and one on Mobile and Mobility Industries. With this, we hope to overcome the project-oriented approach, and mainstream service innovation more into other policies.
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The EU’s Innovation Performance is good
but there’s Room for Improvement According to the 2010 Innovation Union Scoreboard published on 1 February 2011 by the European Commission, the EU is failing to close the gap between its innovation performance and those of the main international competitors, the US and Japan. The EU still maintains a clear lead over the emerging economies of India and Russia, whilst Brazil is making steady progress and China is catching up. The gaps between the EU and the US and Japan are particularly large and they are increasing rapidly in terms of the license and patent revenues received from abroad. These revenues are important indicators of economic dynamism and so the economic model, and also the functioning of the internal market for protected knowledge in the EU need to be improved. In addition, the scoreboard shows that the EU is producing fewer, high-impact patents than the US and Japan and that it is not positioning itself sufficiently well in global growth sectors. In the light of these results, Vice-President Antonio Tajani, Commissioner for Industry and Entrepreneurship, stressed “the need to step up our efforts in making Europe more innovative in order to catch up with our main competitors and recover the path of robust and sustainable growth.” Europe’s research and innovation gap lies primarily in the private sector. Thus, the
priority should be to create conditions that will encourage more private sector investment and facilitate the exploitation of research results by the business sector, in particular, through a more efficient patent system. This is the first edition of the Scoreboard to be produced under the Innovation Union flagship initiative. It draws on 25 research and innovation-related indicators and covers the 27 EU Member States, as well as Croatia, Serbia, Turkey, Iceland, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Norway and Switzerland. Within the EU, Sweden has the most impressive performance followed by Denmark, Finland and Germany, whilst the performances of Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania are well below the EU27 average.
Máire Geoghegan-Quinn presenting the results of the Innovation Scoreboard 2010
In a bid to improve the EU’s performance, MEPs gave their consent, in February, for a number of EU Member States to push ahead with plans to create a single European patent, using a EU procedure known as ’enhanced co-operation.’ A decision made by these MEPs sitting in Strasbourg, on 15 February, was a further step towards abolishing the current system, under which businesses must secure intellectual property protection, separately in each individual Member State. A total of 25 countries will participate in this strengthened, cooperative arrangement. The missing two, Spain and Italy, have protested about the linguistic regime, as patents can only be registered in English, French or German. The full report at :
EU Member States’ innovation performance
http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise > Policy highlights > Innovation > Facts, figures and analysis > Innovation Union Scoreboard
European Patent Office : www.epo.org
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Bet ter Suppor t for Ser vice Innovation
Lessons
Innovation in Services
from the KIS Partnerships During the second phase of Europe INNOVA, the partnerships in the Knowledge Intensive Service Innovation Platform (KIS-IP) have been laboratories that searched for, and experimented with, practices that could offer improved support to innovative service companies. Mette Koefoed Quinn, Policy Officer from DG Enterprise and Industry, is convinced that “an important achievement has been the awareness, which the KIS-IP partnerships have raised throughout Europe about the importance of better supporting service innovation. Service innovation is an important catalyst for structural change and investment in the future”. Building upon the experiences of the KIS-IP, DG Enterprise and Industry will launch two new initiatives in spring 2011 - the European Creative Industries Alliance and the European Mobile and Mobility Industries Alliance. “To involve as many Member States and regions as possible in these new initiatives, we have added a policy learning platform that will help to spread the results. We hope that these new initiatives will help to mobilise more support for service innovation in Europe,” explained Mette Koefoed Quinn.
Mette Koefoed Quinn, Policy Officer from DG Enterprise and Industry
The pioneers of the work undertaken in the KIS-IP have been the three sectoral partnerships, KIS4SAT, ACHIEVE MORE and KIS-PIMS and the horizontal support action, KISPLATFORM. All these four projects are now in their final phases and: • ACHIEVE MORE has addressed barriers to the growth of KIS ventures in the ICT sector by developing a new, integrated toolkit, called the EIX platform; • The major achievements of KIS-PIMS have been voucher schemes, expert training and a toolbox in the field of renewable energy;
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Jenny Tooth, Chair of the KIS-IP Horizontal Steering Group
• The existing innovation voucher scheme of KIS4SAT has operated effectively and the partnership is facilitating the participation of private investors in supporting KIS ventures within the field of satellite downstream services; • As the horizontal support action, KISPLATFORM has facilitated the creation of synergies between the sectoral partnerships. It has also arranged a number of regional events to showcase successful local service innovators and to discuss what regions can do to support such companies, with local policy-makers. Jenny Tooth, Director of the Angel Capital Group and Chair of the KIS-IP Horizontal Steering Group believes that “the KIS partnerships have addressed the current fragmentation of innovation support and pushed forward the boundaries of this support. They have improved access to relevant sources of publicly and privately generated sources of financial support. This includes commitments from Member States to new innovation voucher schemes for KIS businesses and support for new clusters of KIS businesses, as well as access to around €100 million in new VC funds.” More information at : www.europe-innova.eu > Innovation in Services > KIS Innovation Platform
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ACHIEVE MORE KIS IP The Results
Innovation in Services ACHIEVE MORE
Robert Sanders, EBN, moderates a discussion by incubator managers on the ACHIEVE MORE SOFT LANDING tool
The final event of ACHIEVE MORE took place on 16 March 2011, in Brussels. At this meeting, the project shared its key outcomes with a group of 60 policy-makers and incubator or cluster managers. One significant achievement has been the PPP Seed Fund set up in England which brought together €9.5 million from the EIB, ERDF and RDA and €10 million of Angel Investors’ funding. Over the next five years, more than 200 SMEs are expected to benefit from investments ranging between €60,000 and €170,000. Another funding success was the work with the Delft University of Technology and its YES Delft incubator. This created a PPP fund of €8 million involving government, corporate and banking finance and from which around 10 investments will be made. In terms of training, some 800 SMEs have used the ACHIEVE MORE toolkit, and 59 of these have gone on to raise €10 million. During the next few years, another 500 SMEs should get funding, as a direct result of their contact with ACHIEVE MORE. In addition, over 100 business coaches have been trained to use the project’s tools and thus, many hundreds of SMEs should also benefit from this legacy. Finally, in terms of technologies, a film media library on innovation and entrepreneurship has been set up with resources in six
European languages. To date, over 7,000 downloads have been made from www.achievemore.eu and this portal will remain on line for several years. Also, an Innovation and Entrepreneurship community of 550 professionals continues to exchange best practices at www.eandix.ning.com. These results of ACHIEVE MORE are expected to be implemented on a much larger scale. In particular, those techniques and models that can bridge funding gaps. “Incubation is needed to cultivate entrepreneurship, to generate those ideas that will lead to gazelles and EU champions,” said Reinhard Büscher, Head of Support for Industrial Innovation Unit at DG Enterprise and Industry, who added “raising PPP funding is a challenge still ahead of us and we need to develop new institutions, with a new logic, to support the development of creative industry based services.” He also believes that “Clusters for creative industries may look very different from clusters today, as they might be firmly based on networks and relationships. Demand-driven innovation, which includes customers, means that we will have to work with new integration agencies. We need to understand the linkages that have to be built to support all forms of innovation and all forms of creativity.” When ACHIEVE MORE ends in April 2011, it is hoped that many of its beneficiary SMEs will transform themselves into gazelles, which will be able to trade profitably on a world-wide stage.
CEO of Øresund IT cluster, Micael Gustafsson, receives the ACHIEVE MORE award for outstanding ICT cluster
More information at : www.europe-innova.eu/ achieve-more
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Service Innovation and the Structural Funds
Innovation in Services
New Horizons
for Growth and Competitiveness
Realising the potential of the Structural Funds to promote Service Innovation across Europe was the focus of a recent KIS Partnering Forum. This was the final event of the first phase of the Knowledge Intensive Service – Innovation Platform (KIS-IP). The forum, at the Warsaw Stock Exchange, brought together over 100 innovation practitioners, policy-makers, companies and investors. The event focused on how service innovation can help to drive regional economic growth and competitiveness through the effective use of Structural Funds. KIS Partnering Forum, Warsaw, 27-28 January 2011
More information at : www.europe-innova.eu > Innovation in Services > KIS Partnering Forum > KIS Partnering Forum 2011
Creative Credits : www.creative-credits.org.uk
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The role of Structural Funds in Poland was addressed by Malgorzata Tacka-Matusiewicz, from Tauron Polska Energia, who believed that “Too slow or delayed funding creates mistrust of the funding programme. Simplification and speeding up of fund transfer is needed and therefore, innovation vouchers designed to promote service innovation are a key issue.” Practical experiences of accessing the Structural Funds to support new service concepts were introduced during the event. Karolina Loth–Babut, from the Polish National Energy Conservation Agency, presented the findings of an analysis of voucher schemes financed by the Structural and Cohesion Funds. The analysis, carried out within the GreenConServe project, included examples of the voucher schemes in six countries. The innovation vouchers schemes varied significantly in their characters and constraints. In addition,
different kinds of institutions were managing the systems.The analysis showed that a voucher scheme requires an adaptation of the organisational structure in the managing institution. For example, additional staff may be needed at different stages of the implementation of the scheme. Angelos Manglis, the coordinator of the MOBIP partnership, presented the grant and voucher schemes that had been developed to support the mobile service sector in Greece. The pilot schemes led to the adoption of the Digital Value Scheme with an overall budget from public funding of 50 m €, which was recognised as a concrete benefit derived from the involvement of the Structural Funds. The use of the Structural Funds was discussed by a Roundtable of policy-makers and innovation practitioners. “If we want to support growth through the Structural Funds, we have to look at where growth comes from,” said Katharina Krell, who is the coordinator of the GreenConServe partnership. She also felt that “the transfer procedure, through the Structural Funds, needs to be reshaped and new instruments have to be introduced to improve the uptake of new services”. Nine Structural Fund projects were presented at the event and the most promising was judged to be Creative Credits. This Manchester-based project, driven by NESTA, offers an online marketplace for networking and for creative suppliers to showcase their services for SMEs. It has also stimulated long-term Business-to-Business relationships and many additional innovative projects.
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A Sectoral Innovation Watch Event produces
New Insights
into recent Innovation Dynamics in Value Chains
On 24 February 2011, the Sectoral Innovation Watch organised its final conference entitled ‘Dynamics in Sectoral Innovation: Impact on Value Chains and Policy Implications?’ The event brought together more than 80 participants from the innovation support community. It aimed to synthesise the project’s analyses of the dynamics and futures of nine industrial sectors. It also considered forces that blur the boundaries in value chains such as cluster-driven service innovation. The nine sectors included Biotechnology, Electrical and Optical Equipment, Automotive, Space and Aeronautics, Construction, Wholesale and Retail Trade, Knowledge Intensive Business Services, Food and Drink and finally, Textiles. This sectoral approach is complemented by a horizontal focus on five cross-sectoral themes that are the object of current innovation policy debates, namely: eco-innovation; lead markets; organisational innovation; national specialisation and fast-growing firms or ‘gazelles.’ The discussions highlighted the innovation and competitiveness gains, which can be obtained by smart regulation, eco-innovation, cluster cooperation and service innovation. However, this has to be seen in the context of dramatically rising global challenges. Industrial innovation policy responses have to be boldly led and better coordinated, with industrial collaboration across value chains in self-reinforcing innovation eco-systems.
Sectoral Innovation Watch
The Roundtable participants emphasised that it was the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ that needed more attention in European industrial innovation policy. This indicated the sense of urgency that was required in the delivery of more effective policies measures, and such urgency will also be necessary if the targets of the Europe 2020 Strategy are to be met. This conference concluded the activities of the Sectoral Innovation Watch that began in 2008 and has constantly aimed to provide policy-makers and innovation professionals with more detailed insights into sectoral innovation dynamics across Europe. In each of the nine sectors the bottlenecks that influence sectoral innovation performance have been identified and analysed. After the conference, the consortium is now synthesising all the available data to produce its final report. This report, together with the nine sectoral reports and five cross-sectoral reports, will be published in the coming months on the Europe INNOVA website together with common themes such as eco-innovation, where a huge gap exists between the potential of known technologies and their current availability on the market. The results of the Sectoral Innovation Watch will also be disseminated to European and national policy-makers and the policy support community. This improved understanding will help policy-makers to promote the growth of innovative enterprises by developing better informed and more effective innovation policies at regional, national and European level.
Carlos Montalvo, coordinator of the SIW project
More information at : www.europe-innova.eu/siw
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The Eco-Innovation Observatory Eco-Innovation Observatory
publishes its first results
Eco-innovation now offers a huge market for enterprises and has become an important element of the European Union strategy in response to the current global environmental and economic challenges. The EIO collects and analyses information on trends in this area and provides a strategic knowledge resource for policy-makers, business and finance. Established in 2009, it has now published its first results.
Reports The report ‘Eco-Innovation Challenge: Pathways to resource efficient Europe’ is the first EIO annual report. It focuses on material productivity and the related eco-innovation challenge that European governments and businesses face. The report analyses the eco-innovation performance of countries and industries and features the EIO eco-innovation scoreboard for the first time. The report also includes concrete examples of some eco-innovations that have been implemented in the EU and beyond. The EIO network of national experts has prepared the first version of the eco-innovation country profiles that present a synthetic overview of the eco-innovation processes and performance of all EU Member States. The profiles are also available as web-based documents and include the description of the leading and emerging eco-innovation areas. These are illustrated by a succinct presentation of the public policies
supporting eco-innovation, as well as by selected examples of eco-innovative solutions developed in individual countries. The EIO has also published its first two thematic reports that focus on resource efficient construction and on water innovation. Both reports study eco-innovation in the specific context of the selected areas and include a rich choice of examples of innovative technological and non-technological solutions. The report on resource efficient construction also includes the first results of the EIO Delphi survey on the future of sustainable construction.
On-line repositories The EIO website presents the first versions of the repositories of eco-innovation data and good practices, as well as the on-line eco-innovation glossary. The EIO databases enable users to browse through the data and numerous examples coming from all EIO reports. The repositories are open to the registered users of the EIO portal. They will be gradually developed in future years with users’ contributions and suggestions for further examples are most welcome.
Next steps The EIO is currently working on the future thematic reports as well as on making its evidence base more robust. The latter is being carried out by improving the connections with other relevant, on-going EU initiatives and by developing dedicated EIO analyses.
EU27 Eco-Innovation Performance Scoreboard
More information at : www.europe-innova.eu/eio
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Understanding the Drivers of Regional Competitiveness
The European Cluster Observatory is a reference point for the mapping and analysis of clusters in Europe. It has recently introduced a series of regional competitiveness indicators into its new-look interactive cluster mapping tool that can be analysed in combination with the cluster data. The regional indicators fit within a framework that has been developed to try to create a better understanding of the factors that drive regional competitiveness. These factors, which measure and influence regional economic activity, are organised in four layers. While the top two layers measure final and intermediate ‘outcomes’ and the bottom layer captures certain regional ‘fundamentals,’ the key layer, in terms of policy impact, is the third layer of ‘competitiveness drivers.’
The range of indicators can be drawn on maps, and plotted against each other, by using a dynamic graph tool, or by being downloaded as raw data. This provides a practical and user-friendly way for policy-makers to benchmark their regions.
Developing new products or services goes hand in hand with risk taking. It is also assumed that the number of new products introduced to market mainly depends on effective innovation management rather than on the amount of money invested in R&D. Thus, improved innovation procedures and proper risk assessment may be seen as the basis for market success and this is where the components in the EcoCluP toolbox come into play.
More information at : www.europe-innova.eu/ eu-cluster-observatory
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The framework and data also supports academic analysis. For example, they provide a solid basis for an improved understanding of the relative importance of the business environment and of clusters in determining competitiveness outcomes.
The EcoCluP Toolbox Preparing companies for innovation Together with management experts, EcoCluP has tested newly-developed, computer-based assessment tools that are adapted to the needs of small and medium-sized, eco-innovative enterprises.
European Cluster Observatory
The Risk Assessment Tool calculates the specific risk associated with all the various dimensions in the product development, whilst the Innovation Management Quick Check analyses different aspects that have an impact on innovation procedures such as the company’s strategy, ideas and project management, R&D budget and market orientation.
Cluster Cooperation EcoCluP
More information at : www.europe-innova.eu/ecoclup
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Using a scoring method, these tools produce a picture of the company’s performance. Based on that picture, and with the assistance of the professional cluster personnel, many significant recommendations for improvement can be formulated. Experience has shown that by using the EcoCluP Toolbox, companies can realise their full innovation potential and also assess the readiness of their products for market.
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THE NEWS IN BRIEF:
Linking the Food Industry to Eco-Innovation Dominique Ladevèze Director, Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie du Vaucluse Eco-Innovation
Partnerships for better innovation support Europe INNOVA is an initiative of the European Commission’s Directorate General Enterprise and Industry which aspires to become the laboratory for the development and testing of new tools and instruments in support of innovation with a view to help innovative enterprises innovate faster and better. It brings together public and private innovation support providers such as innovation agencies, technology transfer offices, business incubators, financing intermediaries, cluster organisations and others. The newsletter of the Europe INNOVA initiative © European Commission - Reproduction is authorised, provided the source is acknowledged.
EcoTroFood
The EcoTroFood project began in January and aims to improve the access of the food industry to information and knowledge about eco-innovation. The services that it develops will become part of a European Food Eco-innovation Platform. Firstly, it will promote more creativity by stimulating eco-innovative technical solutions and food products or services. This will involve 34 national business-plan competitions to generate new eco-innovative products, evaluated on their life-cycle performance. SMEs will also receive support for product development and marketing at national and European level.
Secondly, attempts will be made to bridge the gap between R&D and the agro/food market. Five national matchmaking forums and two European matchmaking forums will facilitate the access of 100 eco-innovative SMEs to investors and first-users. A Quality Certificate for credibility and proof of concept, participant interaction methodologies such as speed-dating and incentives for first-users, including public procurement ranking methods, will all be developed. Finally, a European stakeholder networking tool will be created for SMEs, universities, research centres, investors, (first)-users and clusters active in the sector.
dladeveze@vaucluse.cci.fr | www.europe-innova.eu/ecotrofood
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COMING EVENTS:
Editorial contact: newsletter@europe-innova.eu
5 - 7 April 2011, Munich, Germany
Published by: Sparks and all other elements of the Europe INNOVA communications project are performed by a consortium of companies headed by Logotech SA (Greece). Legal notice: This publication has been produced as part of the Europe INNOVA initiative. The views expressed in this report, as well as the information included in it, do not necessarily reflect the opinion or position of the European Commission and in no way commit the institution. This newsletter is financed under the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) which aims to encourage the competitiveness of European enterprises.
4th PRO INNO Europe® Partnering Event – Innovating Knowledge Transfer The Innovation Union Communication of the European Commission, in 2010, indicated that: “Supporting ‘broad based innovation’ requires a better understanding of knowledge transfer” and that “The sources of innovation are diverse and go far beyond Research and Development.” In today’s business world, creativity, skills, knowledge and technologies are the ingredients for successful innovation. Providing companies with better access to these ingredients is the basic task of innovation support. The objective of the PRO INNO Europe® Partnering Event in Munich is to identify existing and future challenges for knowledge transfer and to consider innovative ways of supporting this transfer.
For more information please visit: www.proinno-europe.eu/ proinno-partnering-event
7 - 8 April 2011, Rome, Italy The ImMediaTe Cross-Media Summit – Digital Creativity for Cross-Media Content Production and Services This event will address the development and use of cross-media, as a catalyst for the further development of digital creativity and cultural heritage. Since the nineties, the promotion of technological convergence has brought us from multimedia to networked media. Now, the focus must be on eliminating the fragmentation between the many contiguous, networked media communities. The ImMediaTe Cross-Media Summit will bring together people who are involved in this exciting socio-technological revolution to provoke a discussion on new trends and opportunities for the expansion of digital creativity and the digital media market.
Printed on recycled paper with vegetable-based ink.
For more information please visit: www.europe-innova.eu/immediate
European Commission Enterprise and Industry