More technology is not the answer to the innovation problem

The panel suggests EU action should be focused around compelling social challenges, moves to finance venture and social innovation funds, incentivising large scale community level innovations, and transforming the public sector to unlock the potential of new infrastructure and new types of partnerships.

The panel criticises current European innovation policy, saying it fails to:

• Leverage the power of networks and social innovation.
• Implement Community level actions orchestrated around major societal challenges
• Invest ambitiously and strategically in the future
• Open up innovation to the creativity of a broad range of people and ideas
• Anticipate the new institutions and processes that will drive future innovation

To address this, the panel makes five suggestions:

1. Broaden the concept of innovation: while businesses innovate mainly for return on investment, society must innovate for social return and transformation. Europe faces unprecedented challenges. This calls for collaborative, cross-cutting responses reaching out to business, public policy communities, researchers, educators, public service providers, financiers and NGOs.
2. Increase the speed of innovation, by promoting the uptake of new services and technologies, especially in the public sector. Funding programmes and innovation support must be synchronised with development of standards, public procurement and regulations. The EU should set clear innovation targets; launch ambitious European initiatives around major challenges; ensure EU directives and regulations support innovation; change public procurement to support innovation; and open up government-owned data to facilitate a knowledge infrastructure, where European citizens can help transform public services.
3. Invest in future infrastructure and unlock its potential: Every household, business and public building should have ultrafast broadband and smart energy grid connections. The EU should implement an integrated, cross-border investment strategy and combine infrastructure projects with support for innovative services and open access.
4. Innovative financing models: Europe needs a radical new approach to financing innovation with new partnerships to share risk and more intelligent ways to combine funding between instruments. Innovation should be core to financial institutions, with the European Investment Bank (EIB) becoming a European Innovation Bank through the creation of a pan-European Innovation Fund. There should be moves to develop an EU-wide market for trading and sharing intellectual property.
5. Create new places for new types of collaborations. Information technologies and web 2.0 tools are transforming how people interact. Open innovation is based on the power of networks and access to knowledge across Europe and globally. To build on this the panel proposes the creation of networked innovation labs, investment in cultural and creative institutions, organisations and networks, a major prize for innovative localities and incentives for universities and public research centres to be more open and international.

The Business Panel on future EU innovation policy was established by DG Enterprise and Industry of the European Commission with a mandate to recommend priorities and actions for future EU innovation policy.

The members of the Panel are Diogo Vasconcelos (Chair), Distinguished Fellow, Cisco Systems International; Dr Anne Stenros, Design Director (Vice President, Design), KONE Corporation; Gianfranco Corini, President, NEXT-Ingegneria dei Sistemi S.p.A; Professor Rüdiger Iden, Senior Vice President, BASF SE; Jan Lamser, Member of Board of Directors and Senior Executive Officer, CSOB Bank; with Maureen McKelvey, Professor of Industrial Management, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg acting as rapporteur.  

http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/innovation/files/panel_report_en.pdf