European Committee of the Regions and European Commission join forces to enhance support for the implementation of Research & Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation in EU regions

The President of the CoR, Markku Markkula, today emphasised the way for the CoR to better support the implementation of Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation (RIS3) in EU regions. At a conference organised in Seville on the challenges and implementation of RIS3, the President underlined that stimulating the development of “Smart specialisation strategies at regional level will be instrumental to ensuring a territorial approach when narrowing the "Innovation Divide" between and within the EU Member States. "RIS3 is an economic transformation agenda for regions, a dynamic and evolutionary process", he stressed.

Organised by the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies - one of the seven institutes of the Commission's Joint Research Centre - and hosted by the Regional Government of Andalusia, the conference brought EU, national and regional representatives together, including the European Commissioner for Regional Policy, Corina Crețu i, and Lambert Van Nistelrooij i, MEP, as well as experts and policy makers.

Commissioner Crețu opened the conference by stating that research areas must be coupled with the economic exploitation of new ideas and permanent questioning on how to do new, better and different things. "This is innovation" she said.

Focussing on the "Stairway to Excellence" and smarter politics, Lambert Van Nistelrooij, MEP, noted that specialised reforms and clusters should cooperate to make Europe more competitive in the global context: " Our investments in research and development need a better uptake all over Europe if we want to boost innovation and high value production. Products made in Europe's regions will strengthen Europe as a whole " he said.

President Markkula welcomed the design of regional strategies for smart specialisation (S3). He emphasised that S3 can be pivotal in " combining the EU objectives of research, innovation and industrial renaissance with key EU multi-financing initiatives (e.g. EU Structural Funds, Juncker Investment Plan, Horizon 2020).

The main CoR objectives towards RIS3 are to reach out to regions, encourage them to adopt RIS3 more effectively and to stimulate cross-fertilization of ideas and actions between regions. The CoR would also like to help regions develop "Regional Ecosystems" by creating synergies between government, research, education and innovation (e.g. to move towards Open Innovation 2.0 and the Quadruple Helix Model).

To achieve these objectives, the CoR proposes the following:

Better integration of the regional decision-making processes in the use of smart specialisation strategies by supporting pioneering pilot activities with volunteer regions. This can be done with further simplifying the administrative processes to focus on impact and European regional partnerships as well as creating advanced digitalised innovation platforms;

Links should be forged between the use of the new European Fund for Strategic Investments for financing R&D infrastructure and smart specialisation strategies at local and regional level;

Exploring the possibility to develop a Local Administration Facility-type programme to increase learning possibilities of regions focusing on intelligent strategies, funding instruments and European partnerships;

Including the Regional Innovation Scoreboard as a key indicator of the revised Europe 2020 Strategy which is expected in the second half of this year.

The CoR and the European Commission's Directorate General for Research and Innovation have already agreed to set up a "Regional Knowledge Platform", which will accumulate knowledge and expertise from regions across the EU. Such a platform will help to identify priorities and measures, which can encourage regions to take a more proactive role in research and innovation and to reap the benefits of European initiatives and programmes.

To achieve all of these objectives, President Markkula concluded that " further collaboration between the European Committee of the Regions and the European Commission and the European Parliament will be instrumental."

Photos of the event are available here