The Innovation Union Flagship under the Europe 2020 Strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth introduced the concept of European Innovation Partnerships in order to mobilise Europe’s expertise and resources in a coherent manner and to foster synergies between the EU and the Member States to tackle the most critical societal challenges faced by Europe such as an ageing population, the effects of climate change, and reduced availability of resources.
The European Innovation Partnerships are seen as a means of boosting the competitiveness of Europe’s industry and of accelerating research, development and market deployment of innovations in areas of critical importance to society such as active and healthy ageing, sustainable and productive agriculture, raw materials and water, smart cities/applications for the benefit of citizens and businesses, mobility, logistics and transport.
In support of the European Innovation Partnership concept, one of the key recommendations of the Expert Panel on Service Innovation in the EU is to use large–scale demonstrators as a means of “… de-risking innovation by providing a staged process …” that moves from small-scale prototypes to a smaller number of large-scale near-market projects in which a range of solutions are tested under real-life conditions with a view to better exploiting the transformative power of service innovation to tackle societal challenges.
Under Europe INNOVA, public-private partnerships have been developing and testing new ways of supporting innovative companies to improve their innovation capacity, demonstrating how innovation and, in particular, service innovation in combination with a favourable business environment can help SMEs gain competitive advantages and access to new markets. As such Europe INNOVA has been building small-scale transnational prototypes in a wide range of sectors, including creative industries, renewable energy and resource efficiency, and mobile and satellite-enabled services.
Against this background, the 2011 Europe INNOVA Annual Partnering Event will explore how the instruments and services piloted by Europe INNOVA partnerships have contributed to transforming regional economies, to better addressing societal challenges and to foster smart specialization with a view to draw lessons on what can be expected from such public-private partnerships in terms of adding value to the concepts of large-scale demonstrators and European Innovation Partnerships.
Three consecutive sessions on transforming regional economies, better addressing societal challenges and fostering smart specialization, will each discuss:
- The impact of successful Europe INNOVA partnerships and the critical success factors for achieving this impact, notably how they have mobilized the support of public actors and leveraged additional funds, and
- In which areas of future EU initiatives the European added value of such partnerships and approaches would be highest and for which types of activities.
The 2011 Europe INNOVA Annual Partnering Event, hosted by the Fraunhofer Centre for Central and Eastern Europe (Fraunhofer MOEZ), will take place at the Fraunhofer-Forum Berlin, on October 12 – 14, 2011.
