19.8.2008   

EN

Official Journal of the European Union

C 211/1

1.1

The Committee can only give firm support to the Commission's initiative to the degree that this takes into account not only the problems of demand, but also — and primarily — supply-side optimisation, avoiding failures and red tape.

1.2

The Committee is convinced that the promotion of initiatives at local and regional level and the capacity to network them in furtherance of the Lisbon Strategy is essential for combined research and development efforts that are successful in setting up and developing innovative businesses throughout the Union. Above all, however, it is essential to involving economic and social players operating at territorial level in working towards the shared goals of more and better jobs, in a context of overall sustainable and competitive development.

1.3

The Committee reiterates the importance of the knowledge triangle (education, research and innovation), which plays a critical role in promoting growth and jobs. For this reason, it is urgent to step up reforms, promote excellence in higher education and in partnerships between universities, research centres and companies and ensure that all education and training sectors play their full part in nurturing creativity and innovation, especially at regional and local level. This especially applies to those specific regions — Euregios — where neighbours and partners are networked in areas that transcend national borders.

1.4

The Committee thinks that the competitiveness of Europe's regions and their development in economic, social and employment terms must be pursued more pro-actively and with more coordination than at present. This will make it easier to get the best possible tangible results in pursuit of the Lisbon Strategy goals.

1.5

The Committee concurs unreservedly with the Commission's diagnosis of shortcomings in the joint and coordinated use of the Community instruments, but expresses its regret that more than ten years later this crucial issue is still approached in terms of analysis rather than getting to the nub of the problem, which is to develop new simultaneous engineering capacities (1) of various types across both Community and European action.

1.6

The Committee considers that action on the demand side is needed, but is not sufficient in itself. In its view, we must move on from declaring the need for regions to be more focused and achieve:

1.7

In the Committee's view, far-reaching action should be taken on the supply side to ensure a consistent framework that provides easy access to all available instruments. The aim is to overcome legal obstacles and the time-lag between initiating and actually delivering financial support, in order to make Europe's regions more competitive.

1.8

The Committee considers it vital that a European Practical Guide be compiled which furnishes an overview of:

1.9

The Committee also maintains that specific and precise Community action can no longer be postponed if new simultaneous engineering capacities of various types of action are to be achieved and resources are to be maximised and concentrated in the regions.

1.10

As it has stated in a previous opinion (2), the Committee thinks there is an urgent need, therefore, to address the problems of plurality of governance levels and the fragmentation of interventions needed for a competitive relaunch of Europe's regions. In this connection it proposes instigating a new initiative — entitled JASMINE: Joint Assistance Supporting Multiprojects for Innovation Networking in Europe — to tackle the present institutional gaps on both the demand and supply sides and to cut red tape significantly.

1.11

The aim of JASMINE should be to enable the various players involved in a network decision-making process to behave in a more informed and coordinated way within a single coherent regional planning framework.

2.1

The European regions of knowledge are contending with numerous elements of change that constitute both challenges and opportunities and influence their capacity to achieve the goals of the revised Lisbon Strategy.

2.2

These elements of change include:

—   external factors: more intense globalisation, the emergence of areas of the continent with very dynamic growth, much higher energy and raw materials prices, unforeseen scientific and technological developments, the internationalisation of innovation, climate change issues and often unmanaged or unmanageable migratory pressures;

—   internal factors: population ageing, protection of the environment and quality of life, obsolescence of production and services, public sector modernisation, growing interaction between new emerging kinds of knowledge and available human resources, capacity for cultural growth and creativity, and development of common territorial infrastructure, both physical and intangible.

2.3

The Committee has expressed its views on these issues a number of times, both in specific contexts and in the broad context of the evolution of the Lisbon Strategy and Community policies on research and innovation, the environment and education and training.

2.4

In particular, the Committee has emphasised the need to ‘enable the whole EU area to adjust to the challenges of the knowledge-based economy and thus help all regions to take account of the Lisbon objectives’ (3).

2.5

The Committee has further asserted that: ‘The new configuration of competitive models on the global market is imposing major changes. The new integrated platforms and networks must address themes relating to research and innovation, the management of new human resources, promotion and marketing, finance and credit, logistics and market and client service management’ (4).

2.6

The Committee reiterates its conviction that the promotion of initiatives at local level and the capacity to network them in furtherance of the Lisbon Strategy are essential to encourage the setting-up of innovative businesses in a context of sustainable and competitive development. This especially applies to those specific regions — Euregios — where neighbours and partners are networked in areas that transcend national borders. In its opinion on the Green Paper on The European Research Area:

2.7

In its opinion on the Green Paper on The European Research Area: New perspectives, the Committee recommended that ‘the European Research Area should be complemented by a European Knowledge Area designed to create a European knowledge-based society’ and pointed out that ‘[c]oordination [was] also needed from the Commission to create effective leadership and advisory structures and to ensure that work […] [was] well organised’ (5).

2.8

Finally, the Committee has underscored the importance of the knowledge triangle (education, research and innovation), which plays a critical role in promoting growth and jobs. For this reason, it is important to step up reforms, promote excellence in higher education and in partnerships between universities, research centres and companies and ensure that all education and training sectors play their full part in nurturing creativity and innovation, especially at regional and local level.

2.9

The Committee thinks that the competitiveness of Europe's regions and their development in economic, social and employment terms must be pursued more pro-actively and with more coordination: the Commission must try to get beyond the obstacles presented by various legal bases and procedural criteria. The aim must be to make the best use for the taxpayer of various Community budget instruments in order to maximise tangible results in pursuit of the Lisbon Strategy goals. These results should be in areas such as the effectiveness of joint access, coordination, and synergies and synchronisation of available interventions at Community and pan-European level. They should achieve the critical mass needed to generate a multiplier effect.

2.10

According to the renewed Lisbon Agenda's integrated guidelines for growth and jobs, cohesion policy has three strategic priorities (6):

2.11

On the supply side, difficulties in achieving a leverage effect and a coordinated use of funding instruments available for achieving these goals stem from the inherent nature of the instruments themselves, namely:

2.12

On the demand side, regions often:

2.13

Shortcomings must be addressed by making technical assistance and coordination available to all Community programmes from the outset.

2.14

The commendable synergy initiatives in various structural programmes and instruments for the 2007-2013 period would appear to be a prerequisite — albeit not the only one — for getting the best concrete results from them.

2.15

The Committee has expressed its support for Commission initiatives such as JEREMIE and has proposed a JEREMIE Focal Point to act as a coordination and information unit between the various actions, pointing out the lack of ‘a project capable of coordinating and fine-tuning the many loan instruments currently in existence’ (8).

2.16

The Committee fully supports and concurs with Commissioner Hübner's statements on JASPERS, JEREMIE and JESSICA (9), which ‘have created new dynamics and expectations for investment, growth and jobs in the Member States and regions, as well among the social partners across all the regions of the European Union’.

2.17

The Committee maintains that the guidelines adopted by the European Union committee for scientific and technical research (CREST) (10) and published in September 2007 are important in showing the way forward, though they are confined to the interaction between the Framework Programme for research and development and the new Structural Funds.

3.1

The Commission proposal makes clear the possible synergies that already exist in the funding instruments of European research, innovation and cohesion policies. These are available to stakeholders in order to make Europe's regions more competitive, depending on their capacity to absorb them.

3.2

The principal instruments for action spotlighted are the Seventh Framework Programme for research and development, the new Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) and the new focuses of the Structural and Cohesion Funds.

3.3

The Commission makes it clear that it has worked with a number of advisory coordination groups, which have recommended:

3.4

The Commission calls on the Member States to improve the options for the coordinated development and use of Community instruments and to create systems to inform participating operators of the opportunities available to them. In order to encourage coordinated access to funding, it also undertakes to publish a practical guide by the end of 2007 on the funding opportunities for research institutions, including the arrangements provided by national and regional mechanisms.

4.1

The Committee concurs unreservedly with the Commission's diagnosis of shortcomings in the joint and coordinated use of the Community instruments it mentions; it does not, however, endorse the treatment prescribed, which it thinks is not enough to achieve the goals of the Community policies, above all regarding research, innovation and training.

4.2

The Committee agrees with the Commission (11) that ‘[c]entral to the realisation of the renewed Partnership for Growth and Jobs is the effort to promote the knowledge economy, in particular through research, technological development and innovation’, but believes that this partnership is the joint responsibility of all parties concerned, at Community level no less than at national, regional and local levels.

4.3

The Committee sees a need to go beyond the development of a territorial strategy of technological and innovation research and development and in addition make use of:

4.4

In the Committee's view, far-reaching action should be taken on the supply side to ensure an easily accessible framework for all the instruments available for the competitive development of Europe's regions. This development should be compatible with the aims of a ‘socially responsible region’, involve the social partners, chambers of commerce, academia and organised civil society, and be based on a strategy of European industrial policy (13) that is sustainable in terms of both production and consumption.

4.5

Moreover, while instruments are listed which help boost growth, create more and better jobs and make Europe's regions more competitive through research and innovation, the Committee finds the list incomplete, since it does not mention all the relevant Community intervention instruments and omits the coordination opportunities and requirements of available pan-European and international instruments.

4.6

The Communication omits to mention, or mentions only in passing (14), possibilities of intervention such as:

4.7

Moreover, there is no mention of the pan-European, non-Community, programmes and initiatives that nevertheless promote innovation in the EU, such as:

4.8

The Committee also sees a need, while respecting Article 54(5) of Council Regulation (EC) No 1083/2006, for greater clarification of the difficulties and impediments to joint and coordinated use of applicable instruments at national, regional and local level and by individual operators (19), not only with regard to different legal bases, thematic specialisation, geographical area and modes of implementation, but also in terms of substantial, and sometimes fatal, differences, such as:

4.9

The Committee considers it vital that a European Practical Guide be compiled which furnishes an overview of types of Community and pan-European actions available, the various evaluation criteria and whether possible interventions are compatible and complementary.

4.10

The Committee reiterates the need for coordinated and joint action ‘concerning the links between Community structural policies and the Union's research and innovation policies, as the Committee has urged on several occasions’ and stresses that ‘close coordination of these policies is essential in order to achieve optimum levels of practical synergy and to enable the needs of citizens, businesses and society to be fully met with the overall objective of sustainable, smooth medium- to long-term growth, in keeping with the integrated RTD problem-solving approach and with the key development factor of intangible investment’ (20).

4.11

The Committee stresses the large number of Community policies that, alongside cohesion policy and research policy, help to improve the competitiveness of Europe's regions, and reiterates the need for an integrated and coordinated approach which comprises:

4.12

In this connection, the Committee reiterates its existing views on the need to (23):

4.12.1

The Committee also recommends the integration of Community training programmes.

4.13

The Committee expresses its regret that ten years later this crucial issue is still approached in terms of analysis rather than getting to the nub of the problem, which requires Community intervention to provide new ‘simultaneous engineering capacities of various types of action (technological, demonstrative, innovative, dissemination, educational, financial, etc.) — the aim being to boost employment and production at regional level’ (24).

4.14

The Committee maintains that specific and precise Community action can no longer be postponed if the risk of losses in productivity and employment in Europe's regions is to be averted.

5.1

The EESC advocates a voluntary instrument for simplifying and removing bureaucratic, procedural and conceptual obstacles to the joint use of pan-European, Community, national and regional programmes in line with an accelerated development of the European Research Area (ERA).

5.2

The Committee considers that the current priority is to address problems relating to the plurality of governance levels of the various available interventions to restart the competitiveness of Europe's regions. To this end, it proposes a new initiative — Jasmine: Joint Assistance Supporting Multiprojects for Innovation Networking in Europe — to tackle the present institutional gaps, on both demand and supply sides, in interventions to support innovation and research in the regions.

5.3

Community action should be based on Policy Networking, which could take the following forms:

5.4

The new priorities of regional programmes, focused on innovation, competitiveness and reciprocal learning throughout active life, should make it possible to develop active policies to reinforce and sustain the competitiveness of regions through the funding of regional and interregional foresight exercises, clusters and district networks that provide a strategic vision shared by each region. This can serve as the basis for a technical support action for the best combined use of the most suitable national, Community and pan-European instruments and PPPs.

5.5

Jasmine could serve as a guarantee which would facilitate the acceptance of individual projects by reassuring various funding bodies and programmes that they are a part or stage of a larger project. This could be done on the basis of a Memorandum of Understanding or a cooperation agreement between the European Commission and other Community and non-Community bodies, or under the Commission's administrative regulations when different services of the Commission itself are responsible for individual programmes.

5.6

The aim of Jasmine is to facilitate the mobilisation of financial resources covering different managerial responsibilities and different tiers of governance (public or private) to achieve an optimum critical mass of resources — thus increasing the total leverage effect — in order to create a single multi-project framework that fully meets a European region's shared strategic vision of improving its strong points in technology and innovation.

5.7

Jasmine should be based on the experiences of the Lead Market Initiative, the European Technology Platforms and the Joint Technology Initiatives and on the outcomes of ERANET and ERANET PLUS, the Regions for Economic Change and PRO INNO initiatives and JEREMIE, JASPERS and JESSICA (28).

5.8

Jasmine could maximise the innovation and research efforts of the regions and the companies, human resources, universities, research centres and administrations on which they rest — through the Knowledge and Innovation Communities of the European Institute of Technology (EIT), for example. It should be remembered, however, that innovation is for the most part a commercial activity that must be able to function in the best possible operational environment, especially regarding the tax burden on research, the treatment and protection of intellectual property and the excellence of education and training structures which will generate more and better jobs.

5.9

Finally, Jasmine could help to make the most of the distinctive advantages of the regions and to promote exchanges on innovation and research.