EU COMMISSIONER Máire Geoghegan-Quinn has unveiled far-reaching plans to boost investment in research and innovation and wants European leaders to throw their political heft behind the project.
Warning that Europe faces an “innovation emergency” as it tries to replace millions of jobs lost in the economic crisis, she says the 27 EU states should prioritise policies that will make it easier to achieve commercial results from research into climate change and other complex problems.
The Innovation Union plan includes a pilot project on “active and healthy ageing” which from the beginning of next year aims to achieve an increase of two years in the average number of “healthy life years” for the average European by 2020.
Ms Geoghegan-Quinn hopes this project will be the first of many that might tackle water efficiency, the sustainable supply of raw materials, energy efficiency and agricultural productivity.
Specific projects will be led by EU commissioners as well as national ministers, parliamentarians and industry chiefs with a view to stepping up research, anticipating regulatory hurdles and mobilising demand through public procurement.
“There has been, I like to say, a tendency in the past to look at innovation and research as men in white coats in labs and sometimes eccentric businessmen riding around on beautiful, futuristic-like scooters, and I think that’s got to change and Europe can have a role in changing all of that,” Ms Geoghegan-Quinn told reporters.
The commissioner believes countries that continue to make research and development investments emerge quicker from recession. “Finland . . . was almost bankrupt in the ’90s and made a conscious decision that it would cut almost everywhere else exception in research and development and that was a crucial decision by the government at that time and it paid off handsomely for Finland ever since.”
