Vitalization of technological competitiveness

The recent two decades have been dominated with the narratives aiming at saving welfare, delivering citizen centric services and promoting customer driven innovation productivity. The goal of these policy "discourse" has been to deliver better productivity, ease of use of the various digital services and individual choice by the consumer. These very narrowly and well-focused messages have charmed the general audience, public opinion and political wish fullness of better future. The reality of this era is vicious, while the manual work of ordinary men has disappeared, the brain work of educated and creative individual has been carved out and the new product and innovation investments have been cut one third of key competing peer nations. This reality of "failing state" has been concealed behind appealing promotion of past success stories, massive lift of secondary infrastructure, life quality and environment scoreboard messages hiding the industrial value add and innovation failures on the background. The endogenous growth theories have for long proposed that economic growth is not function of growth of financial sector rather the skills, competencies, creativity and art-of-craft has become central element competitiveness and economic sustainability.

This short writing fused on two the regional enablers: 1) education and 2) regional industrial policy. The synthesis of the fifty year development in "European Community failed to mention industrial policy at all in the 'Treaty of Rome’ and its successor, the EU, mainly followed the horizontal approach." This has led to highly generalist horizontal policies and programmes lacking industrial, sectoral and clusters competitiveness approaches. This has led to slow down of competitiveness and falling behind nations (regions) practising pro-market industrial and innovation policy aiming at competitiveness with "technological progress is driven by local R&D activities which in turn are fuelled by private firms’ aim to profit from inventions". Technology related competencies, development and innovations are essential sources of structural change in undeveloped regions. In Schumpeter’s view, productivity is result of product development gains and innovations that leap to “creative destruction by intangible capital”, a process whereby clusters, sectors, firms and start-ups emerge to grow, and ones associated with old technologies decline. The technology imitation and diffusion can only be productive if the level of skills and competency levels are high enough, incentives for technological development, learning and innovations are strong, leadership of the sponsoring organizations are values and experienced leaders with proven innovation track record, and institutions are relatively well functioning.

European competitiveness evangelist,

Mika