Warsaw, 12/10/2011 (Agence Europe) - Under the aegis of the Polish Ministry of Science and the Ministry of Higher Education, the third EU innovation summit will be held simultaneously in Warsaw and Brussels on Thursday 13 October 2011. This will act as a think tank ahead of the first European Commission “Innovation Convention'” on 5 and 6 December 2011. The Warsaw summit worked on a road map and Richard Granger, head of Technology Partners Foundation, will report back on the summit's ideas to the December convention. Barbara Kudrycka, Polish Science and Higher Education Minister, said the focus should be on coherent EU research and innovation, leaving member states and regions free to act as they desire. She said the conference focused on how to address the challenge of balancing flexibility and coherence, and re-gild the European innovation lily, which has lost its leading position over the last half-century and now lags behind the US and Asia.
One of the solutions under discussion is the setting up of a European Research Area (ERA). Richard Granger said that an ERA would provide a forum to help people understand each other better because innovation suffers from the jigsaw of different players and policies. Granger argued that the regions are capable of ensuring excellence, Aviation Valley in Poland being a prime example of this. He said local skills had to be developed to ensure intelligent regional specialisation in the form of poles of excellence, exploiting regional differences to this end. To achieve this, a special Innovation Fund and Innovation Policy will be needed, he claimed, adding that a more determined policy drive was needed for innovation, rather than focusing solely on research. (VW/transl.fl)