#EUInnovationAgenda: co-implementation, in practice!

#EUInnovationAgenda: co-implementation, in practice!

This year's #WEF23 in Davos was an exclusive opportunity for discussing the importance of investing in education and innovation, to build a competitive and resilient economy and society. In other words, the ideal place to promote our #EUInnovationAgenda with world policy, business, academia and civil society leaders.

Throughout my panel interventions and bilateral meetings with stakeholders, we talked about the kinds of innovations needed to address the most pressing problems facing our society and the industries where we should put in the most effort to boost their growth. Always with one clear ambition: how to cooperate on the EU's innovative response to fostering both competitiveness and resilience.

It is now generally agreed upon that innovation is the single most important factor in a company's ability to remain competitive. Of course, in addition to digitalization to boost business productivity, and macroeconomic measures like those in fiscal and monetary policy. However, digitalization is not sufficient to guarantee competitiveness over the medium to long term.?

At the forefront of the new wave of innovation.

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European companies need to be at the forefront of the new wave of innovation, called "deep tech innovations," if they want to remain competitive in the global market. I was glad to see how companies and public authorities now deeply believe in this ambition!

We need to put our attention on deep tech innovations. Innovations that tackle the most intractable societal problems and have a physical or biological component in addition to a digital one. And the road to success is about joining forces with coherent public-private partnerships based on efforts towards mastering deep tech innovations’ transitions. This is the essence of our #EUInnovationAgenda .

Clean tech is a deep tech.

I am convinced that the Net-Zero Industry Act announced at #WEF23 by President Ursula von der Leyen will heavily rely on deep tech innovations. As a subset of deep technology, environmental technologies will be the primary focus of this Net-Zero Act. Also, the New European Innovation, which we co-created with several enterprises and innovation communities, has measures for funding, experimenting, strengthening ecosystems and empowering talents with relevant skills.

It is critical that we focus on the strategic sectors where Europe has a competitive advantage: innovations in the primary sector (agriculture, forestry for instance), innovations in the industrial sector (in line with our efforts in the field of raw materials notably) and innovations in specific fields, particularly in education and training.

Our journey towards innovation, with impact.

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One day after the publication of our New European Innovation Agenda, we launched on 6 July 2022 a unique group gathering communities and stakeholders committed to accompany the Agenda’s concrete implementation.

With this Coalition of the Willing and thanks to the already visible efforts of its members, I am proud to already see clear results in implementing the five flagships of our Agenda.

  • Improving access to finance for European startups and scaleups, for example, by mobilising untapped sources of private capital and simplifying listing rules. For instance, the Innowave Summit of the Bulgarian Business Forum – one of the most significant high-tech conferences in Southeast Europe – is a unique forum, now empowered by the memorandum of twinning between the cities of Varna, Bulgaria and Cluj-Napoca, in Romania, to gather more than 5 000 companies and join forces on facilitating access to growth sources.
  • On the improvement of the rules to allow innovators to experiment with new ideas, we can count on our innovative Universities and their tailor-made approaches to support entrepreneurship spirit for STEM students. This is the case for the Talent Boost initiative of the University of Vasaa, in Finland: an exclusive programme to invest in talents, fostering synergies between academia and the Finnish industrial community.
  • There is no innovation future without cohesion. Hence, the Agenda also aims at building strong innovation valleys throughout Europe. And here, I am particularly glad to already see the impact with public authorities and private partners’ commitment: from Germany with the University of Hohenheim investment programme in rural innovation ecosystems to Sweden, with impressive innovation days of the Swedish Incubator and Science Parks.
  • Training 1 million deep-tech talents is the goal we set to match industrial and labour market needs with a better skilled labour force. To attract and retain talents in Europe, several initiatives are accompanying our efforts on the ground. Startup Villages created by Alliances of Universities coordinated by the European Bioeconomy University from the University of Almeria, the targeted agenda on talents of the Helsinki-Uusimaa Regional Council or the Strascheg Center for Entrepreneurship in Germany, helping talents to “pass the gap” and set a startup, are some of the vibrant examples.
  • Our last flagship is about improving innovation policy-making through clearer terminology, indicators and data-sets, as well as policy support to Member States and regional authorities. Here, we target a horizontal approach, but without avoiding the importance of local impact. Therefore, the European Innovation Agenda supports communication campaigns such as the InnovUp advocacy one in Italy, bringing targeted proposals to the decision-making tables with incentive schemes empowering research, innovation and startups ecosystems.?

A Call to Action: it is time to seize the momentum!

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In Davos, my message was clear: to act for resilience, it is time to seize the momentum!

By investing in education and fundamental research, by building cohesive ecosystems in vibrant regional innovation valleys and by implementing synergies between academia and industry.

In a first-of-its-kind approach, I was thrilled to welcome at #WEF23 a new group of 26 worldwide companies joining this journey to co-implement our Innovation Agenda and its flagships. I am now already looking forward to taking stock of the concrete results and impact of our growing Coalition, with a first state of play meeting scheduled for next 1 June in Stockholm, Sweden.

Join us in this journey and join our coalitionofthewilling.eu!
Timothy Higgs

Freelance Digital Product / Project Management

1 年

Any movement on this in Germany we can point to? Besides promising money ??

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Václav Quaiser

Bnmmnm ve spole?nosti Amazon

1 年

Máte to tam

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Fiona Whelan

CMO | Sponsorship Director | Marketing Consultant | Digital Marketing Lead | Doctoral Candidate

1 年
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Rick Wielens

Co-Founder at ESTI: Innovation Acceleration: Shared problem shared risk and shared result

1 年

Dear Mariya, thank you for your initiative and actions to connect the different ecosystems across Europe. At the Ecosystem thinking institute we have learned that the future of innovation is about access not ownership. To be successful in Europe we need to focus on and work on our absorptive capacity. Europe is a rich source of original research and technology but relatively poor in bringing this to market. It is not investments that are lacking, investments will follow when the opportunity is real. We fail to create the opportunity by missing out on initiatives that focus more on innovation demand consolidation and market creation. Especially on a European level we are able to create new markets for the challenges we face. In order to successfully make that happen we need to organize more deliberate programs around innovation demand and not only on supply push. From working with e.g. social housing corporations in the Netherlands and collaborating on the need or demand side of innovation we created over 1 billion euro addressable market opportunities for the industry. By doing so the focus goes towards implementation of innovation and not towards the invention or creation of new technologies.

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