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Assessment of the national reform programmes - is it good for us?

Published
by
Ervin Kajzinger
  on  January 26, 2006
  in  Innovation policy
. 0 Comments

Yesterday the European Commission published its assessment on the member states’ reform programmes (national reform programme - NRP) for growth and jobs. In 2005 when the EU leaders decided to revitalise the Lisbon Strategy member states were required to create their national reform programmes which include national contributions to the European level strategy. The assessment on national basis provides a short analysis of the NRPs and identifies strengths and weaknesses of the programmes.

Yesterday the European Commission published its assessment on the member states’ reform programmes (national reform programme - NRP) for growth and jobs. In 2005 when the EU leaders decided to revitalise the Lisbon Strategy member states were required to create their national reform programmes which include national contributions to the European level strategy. The assessment on national basis provides a short analysis of the NRPs and identifies strengths and weaknesses of the programmes. In addition four priority action areas were identified: investment in education, research and innovation; freeing up SMEs; employment policies to get people into work; and guaranteeing a secure and sustainable energy supply. In these areas member states are asked to commit additional measures.

Continue reading ‘Assessment of the national reform programmes - is it good for us?’

University Technology Incubator of STU has started its life

Published
by
Maria Buciova
  on  January 21, 2006
  in  Innovation policy
. 0 Comments

Incubators are one of support activities for newly established small enterprises. At the end of November the newest incubator, a University Technology Incubator of the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava (STU), has started its activities. The incubator was established and financed within the grant scheme INTEG Phare CBC Austria Slovakia.

In the newly reconstructed premises of STU at Pionierska street fifteen start-ups will find here their seat with high quality communication infrastructure as well as further legal, economy, marketing, financial and other special services by starting their businesses. The start-ups will seat in the Incubator for three years. Within this time they should fully start their activities and be able to survive at the market.

Continue reading ‘University Technology Incubator of STU has started its life’

Insight into French SME participation in European FP Programmes

Published
by
Julie Koeltz
  on  October 7, 2005
  in  Innovation policy
. 0 Comments

If you ask French specialists in Innovation issues whether results of SMEs’ participation in FP programmes are satisfactory, the answer is clearly no. Why is that so?

Despite an active participation of French SMEs in FP programmes (at the second rank in the EU 25 after Germany), they get only 9% of FP programmes’ funding that benefits to France. This figure must be compared to a general objective set at a 15% rate and 14% for German SMEs.

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Régens Rt: Commitment brings results

Published
by
Szabolcs Katai
  on  August 7, 2005
  in  Case studies and Innovation policy
. 0 Comments

Régens Rt. [www.regens.hu] is a Hungarian SME which has been consistently increasing its market share in the field of logistics information systems and related fields since its foundation in 1993. Today Régens is a steadily growing company with 35 employees and EUR 1.6m in turnover. One of the key elements in Régens’s success is an emphasis on - and constant investment - in innovation.

Régens is one of the relatively small number of Hungarian SMEs in the IT sector that believe in innovation as a source of competitiveness and have acted consistently with this belief. New products mark this all along the history of the company. One of these products, the Régens CUSTOM[r]S customs system, won the Hungarian Innovation Award in 2002.
Though there have been some Hungarian grants available for innovation support earlier, a new window of opportunity opened in 2004 when Régens realised the potential in the FP6 program of the European Union (though Hungarian organization could participate in the Framework Program as early as of FP4, this was not widely known outside the academic community).

Thus the company has started to explore FP6 opportunities in early 2004, and by early 2006 they became really successful in participating in winning consortia.

One key to this success has been to hire a dedicated person as an international project coordinator whose main task was to build a knowledge base of FP6 opportunities and practical knowledge as well as to actively search for appropriate collaborators and build a network of potential partners in proposals. The coordinator started visiting FP6 events in Hungary as well as international FP6 events.  She established contact with a number of FP6 SSA projects in Hungary and was also an active initiator of an SME network established for exchanging FP6 experiences.

These efforts resulted in Regens taking part in several FP6-IST, FP6-SME, CRAFT and e-Ten proposals over the past two and half years, many of which were indeed successful. One of these is FLUID-WIN, a project which aims at developing an innovative B2B solution in the field of logistics.

Régens builds heavily on innovation in the company strategy, even to the extent that they explicitly integrate innovation activities into their competitive advantage offering and PR activities. Ms. Réka Moksony (moksony.reka@regens.hu) now heads the business development division. She also happens to be the dedicated person the company hired to build the FP6 knowledge of Régens, looks positively into the future and always welcomes potential partners for innovative projects.

Central Europe’s innovation dilemma

Published
by
Steven Carlson
  on  July 5, 2005
  in  Innovation policy
. 0 Comments

Central Europeans like to remind visitors of the great thinkers and innovators their countries have produced: inventors like Nikola Tesla, László Biró, Jozsef Murgaš and Edward Teller, composers such as Anotinín Dvorak and Miklós Rózsa, mathematicians like Benoit Mandelbrot and Pál Erdôs, and writers such as Józef Korzeniowski (Joseph Conrad) and Milan Kundera.

When pressed, Central Europeans will also concede that many of their greatest native sons – including those listed above – only achieved greatness in exile. This is the region’s historical dilemma: How to ensure that local innovators have an opportunity to be successful at home.

The most obvious piece of the puzzle is money. It takes capital to develop a novel idea into patentable intellectual property or a healthy, growing business.

The good news in 2006 is that money is now available – perhaps more than at any other time in the region’s troubled history. It is still an open question, however, whether Central Europe’s professional investors are ready to direct that capital toward riskier, early stage investments in innovative companies.

Continue reading ‘Central Europe’s innovation dilemma’

What are technology platforms? Questions and answers by The European Commission

Published
by
Julie Koeltz
  on  December 15, 2004
  in  Innovation policy
. 0 Comments

Technology platforms have been an innovation in EU research policy. They bring together all interested parties in a particular sector, or areas. These areas are chosen for their strategic importance or their potential contribution to the European Union’s goals of knowledge-based growth, competitiveness and employment. Continue reading ‘What are technology platforms? Questions and answers by The European Commission’

Who are the most innovative countries of the European Union?

Published
by
Julie Koeltz
  on  December 1, 2004
  in  Innovation policy
. 0 Comments

The fourth edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS), published on 24 November 2004, confirmed previous years’ results: Sweden and Finland are the most innovative countries of the European Union and Estonia and Slovenia are leaders of the ten new Member States.

Through 20 indicators, measuring human resources, the creation of new knowledge, the transmission and application of knowledge, and innovation finance, the ESI, established by the European Commission as part of the Lisbon strategy, compares innovation performance within the EU Member States. A composite indicator provides an overview of national performances.

The scoreboard also looks at four aspects of non-technical innovation:

o Non-technical change,
o Implementation of changed organisational structures,
o Implementation of advanced management techniques,
o Implementation of significant changes to aesthetic appearance.

Main observations

Sweden and Finland maintain their leadership positions. Germany and Denmark are performing well above the EU average, with Denmark moving ahead quickly. Netherlands, Ireland and France are slowing down and most of the new EU Member States seem to be catching up.

Luxembourg performs best in three out of the four categories relating to the non-technical aspects of innovation. Germany comes second in all four. Several countries considered as average or poor performers on the overall scoreboard, such as Luxembourg, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Estonia and Slovenia, perform much better according to the indicators for non-technical change.

This reflects, according to EIS, a “substantial changes to organisation and management, as part of a modernisation process, that may provide the necessary foundation for both an increase in per capita GDP and the capacity to innovate”.

EIS indicates that the gap between the EU and the US and Japan remains constant. The gap between the EU and the US is explained by three indicators: patents, percentage of the working population with tertiary education and research expenditure.

Perspectives

The EIS working paper will be used to identify the main innovation policy changes, needed in order to reach the Lisbon objectives. In this respect, the Commission intends establish a policy dialogue with the Member States to establishing a common framework of innovation policy objectives.

For further information, please visit:
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Improving the competitiveness of the European ICT sector: high level European workshop on good public national and regional policies

Published
by
Julie Koeltz
  on  November 14, 2004
  in  Current events, Innovation policy and eCommerce
. 0 Comments

The European Commission organised on Friday 12 November 2004 a high level workshop to present the results of the study on good public national and regional policies in support of the competitiveness of the ICT sector, in which LL&A participated as a consortium member along with Fraunhofer Institute Systems and Innovation Research (FhG-ISI - Germany) and the Strategy, Technology and Policy Institute of the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO-STB). Continue reading ‘Improving the competitiveness of the European ICT sector: high level European workshop on good public national and regional policies’

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