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Urenio Watch Watch: Innovation

Transatlantic Innovation and Competitiveness

Posted on by Panagiotis Tsarchopoulos

The conference ‘Promoting Innovation and Competitiveness: A Transatlantic Dialogue’ took place at 28 April in the Hague, the Netherlands. The main aim of the conference was to increase synergies across the Atlantic to boost the competitiveness of both economies and to spur dynamism between both innovation ecosystems.

High level stakeholders from business, research institutions and government from both sides of the Atlantic took up the challenge to come forward with action- orientated recommendations on three levels:

Strengthen knowledge creation and diffusion

  • Stimulate entrepreneurship throughout the educational system by setting up exchange programmes.
  • Start twinning programmes between universities and higher education institutions.
  • Optimise the use of the Transatlantic EU-US Science and Technology Agreement by encouraging mutualparticipation in research programmes (energy, security).
  • Create a transatlantic platform to exchange good practices concerning science and innovation policies.

Improving the business environment

  • Better communication of the positive effects of globalisation as a joint effort of industry and governments in combination with pro-active redemployment and retraining of the workforce affected by outsourcing and off-shoring.
  • Organise EU-US fora to exchange regional innovation practices.
  • Governments should actively reduce the regulatory burdens which act as a major constraint on innovation.

Enhancing trade and competitiveness

  • State aid rules governing R&D and innovation in the EU should be revised in order to stimulate innovation, whereas greater compliance with WTO agreements would lower the probability of market distortion in the US.
  • Pro-active policies are needed to reward successful startup consortia and to strengthen the networks and clusters within which they operate.
  • Greater efforts should be made by both the EU and the US to introduce universal accounting frameworks that can cope with IPR and intangible assets.

Sources

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