Second meeting of the Expert Panel on Services Innovation in the EU
The Expert Panel on Services Innovation in the EU had its second workshop 14-15 June 2010.
Workshop 2 took place in Copenhagen, at the new IT University. The theme for Workshop 2 was ‘Services innovation as a catalyst for growth - confirm and develop further the key emerging services for enabling smart, sustainable and inclusive growth’. The purpose was to explore in more detail key emerging services for each of the three growth areas in the Europe 2020 strategy – smart, sustainable and inclusive growth, against a number of selection criteria and to enrich the understanding of these services and assess each in terms of the drivers and barriers as well as the transversal potential of the services. Overall, the purpose for Workshop 2 was to get real clarity on the potential of services innovation and which areas to focus on across the three growth areas and why.
The Expert Panel comprises 20 distinguished innovation experts drawn from across industry, academia and public authorities from 15 different Member States. One of the key tasks of the Expert Panel is to produce a large evidence base to support the Europe 2020 Strategy. This evidence base will be a collection of examples of services and policies drawn from all the EU Member States. In addition, it will present a number of key recommendations, a Policy Roadmap for supporting services innovation, and a substantive report providing new knowledge and information about services innovation.
On the critical task of providing practical recommendations on how to transform the economy, Mr Reinhard Büscher, Head of Unit in DG Enterprise and Industry said at the workshop: “It is positive that there is a clear policy focus. We need to redefine the scope in which services innovation can be understood. At the end, if we want to continue with services innovation as a catalyst for change we need to look at hooks that influence change. The issues of transformative services and the transformational potential of services innovation are important and we should explore that in more detail. Another question to address is what we can do to trigger new markets. Where can we bring new approaches and which are the emerging industries and lead markets? This is what we need take into considerations for making our recommendations”.
Workshop 2 was organised in conjunction with the lager services innovation conference ‘Services innovation as a Catalyst for the Europe 2020 Strategy’ . This conference was organized jointly by the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation, EPISIS INNO-net and the European Commission. It addressed the significant potential of services innovation for stimulating growth and tackling social challenges. Approximately 150 business leaders, innovation actors and political decision makers from across Europe attended the 2-day event to discuss how to create the optimal conditions for a dynamic European service economy. The conference was the first time the different activities launched in the area of services innovation during the last year was brought together: the Expert Panel on Services Innovation in the EU, EPISIS INNO-Net and the Europe INNOVA Innovation Platforms. Members from the Expert Panel attended the full conference and also chaired the three parallel roundtable sessions on 15 June 2010. www.europa-innova.eu/copenhagen2010
The format for the workshop on 14 June was a combination of break-out sessions and discussions in plenary. This was broken up only by lunch and a presentation by Hasan Bakshi, one of the Panel members, who presented some of NESTA’s recent work on innovation. The experts were divided into three working groups. During the day, the 20 elected key services within each of their growth areas – smart growth, sustainable growth and inclusive growth, and discussed key trends and the transformative potential for these services and how they impact growth across the economy. They grouped the actors and the firms delivering the services, and explored if there is a ‘service sector’ emerging, and what the potential issues and innovations would be around that. Lastly, they indentified emerging business models as well as the drivers and barriers for these services innovations. A concluding activity in Workshop 2 was the introduction of new feature – an Interactive Policy Roadmap. The Interactive Policy Roadmap is a collaboration tool that engages the experts in the formulation of recommendations and the sharing of background, cases and evidence. Later in the year it will be opened up to the wider EU innovation community.
The Chair of the Expert Panel, Mr. Allan Mayo, emphasized the value of this work “The Interactive Policy Roadmap engages the experts as well as other stakeholder during the full lifetime of the Expert Panel. It is a collaborative tool that will make the final reporting as well as final formulation of recommendations a much more efficient and engaged process”.
After long and productive group discussions and plenary presentations, the Chair of the Expert Panel Mr. Allan Mayo (UK) together with the Secretariat summarized the work achieved during Day 1. Overall, the excepted progress had been achieved and critical input for the Policy Roadmap was indentified. The workshop concluded with all experts taking part in the conference welcome reception, which was hosted by the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation in their historic building in the city centre.
Before 2011, the experts will meet for an additional two workshops before announcing the results of its work at a public event in January 2011. The next workshop will be held in Brighton in September 2010 and the fourth and last workshop in Brussels in December 2010. The themes will be to identify policy initiatives and frameworks for services innovation in the Member States, address the policy challenges, and discuss what can be the role of the European Commission to ensure that the right frameworks and initiatives are in place to promote services innovation. The work of the Expert Panel can be followed at www.europe.innova.eu/expert-panel
