Executive Summary :
«Brainpower in Europe — the driver for growth»
LA BAULE WIC 2008 – June, the 4, 5 and 6
Globalization leads naturally and inevitably to increased competition between regions, which respond by taking the offensive with policies to promote competitiveness built on the creativity of their people.
In contrast to fossil fuels, creative capacity is an inexhaustible resource, a truly enduring strength. As such, it has an essential role to play in the dynamics of sustainability. But it can only do so if the key levers are in place — training and education, international reach, attractiveness, and the permanent presence of talent throughout the region.
Without subscribing to a binary view of a global economy split between a developed world that creates and innovates and a developing world that produces and reproduces, Europe enjoys a wide range of relative advantages.
They include innovation, the cornerstone of its capacity to compete effectively with emerging economies.
These advantages are clearly not a given, acquired once and for all — they are essentially unstable and dependent on key levers that include:
- the quality, diversity and mobility of human resources
- the attractiveness of higher education and research structures for businesses with a focus on R&D and innovation
- support for creative businesses and individuals, and protection of intellectual property
- recognition and effective leveraging of immaterial business capital, favouring and promoting the development of patents, brands and products blending art and technology
- the capacity to integrate new technologies in all sectors of industry and services, in the development of new patterns of consumption, and the emergence of new markets
- the emergence of businesses with leadership positions on world markets
- regional promotion policies with a strong emphasis on innovation
- sweeping adoption of new technologies by all participants in the local economy
- public policies and support services matching supply and demand from innovative businesses
- a virtuous circle structuring the dynamics of innovation — higher education, research, business, consumer demand and public institutions at local level.
In view of this, there is a clear need for appraisal of regional performance as regards innovation. That supposes the existence of tools to measure the overall knowledge offering at local level, plus the capacity to analyse the impact of each key factor on endogenous and exogenous momentum for innovation at the level of competitiveness clusters. This new approach should contribute to the development of appropriate responses to the geographical fragmentation of the value chain, in particular as regards the innovation link, and the emergence of a borderless world for the creation and application of knowledge. It should thus lead up to the selective definition of trans-national clusters, and of tools and services that favour the networking of clusters based on worldwide cooperation among the regions that are the seedbeds of innovation.
Download the scoping paper : English
