Investigating the Impact of the Innovation Union
Investigating the Impact of the Innovation Union
Innovation has been placed at the heart of the Europe 2020 strategy, notably in order to tackle major societal challenges such as climate change, energy scarcity, health and ageing. The Innovation Union (IU) has been translated into 13 general objectives such as “Promoting excellence in education and skill developments”, “Delivering the European Research Area”, “Creating a single research market for innovation”. 34 specific commitments are associated to these objectives. The commitments are aimed at inducing innovation, by means of financial incentives, market incentives, education and skills availability, knowledge transfers, etc. The objective of this project is to deliver a system of assessment for the commitments associated to the “Innovation Union”. The approach starts from the evaluation of the state of achievement of the individual commitments, but puts crucial emphasis on their effects in the innovation system as a whole, as well as on the economy-wide effects of innovation. The basic idea is to retrace the entire chain of effects of the commitments, from their implementation to their final impact in terms of competitiveness, growth or employment, via the innovation process. ZEW task within the consortium consisting of 8 leading European research institutions mainly comprise the analysis of the potential impact of the community patent, harmonization of the regulatory framework in key innovation areas including the potential for standardization, the open access to research results and the systems of technology transfer in Europe.
