The RegStrat Project
Strategic Policy Intelligence Tools for Better S&T Investment Strategies in Europe's Regions project description (pdf)
"The 2-year project adopts an ambitious cross-cutting and integrating approach to harness synergies from past and present developments, and knowledge stocks regarding Strategic Policy Intelligence (SPI1) tools. The approach takes account of the different governance levels, different policy and policy research fields, and the different actor communities of Europe's (trans-) regional, national and sectoral innovation systems." (...)
"What has been shown, e.g. through EU- or self-supported regional initiatives or the Irish experience, is that some territories in Europe and also in other continents made considerable progress through the application of appropriately conceived SPI tools. As regional progress in this respect is also convincing to policy makers and program managers at other governance levels, these territories tend to attract additional resources from national, EU (Regional Development, Agriculture, Infrastructure etc.) and foreign direct investment budgets more successfully.
RegStrat aims, therefore, at supporting regional actors in the acquisition of such expertise. As strategic knowledge is both expensive to generate and difficult to translate into day-to-day decision-making, it is also important to facilitate networking and knowledge-exchange between regions and with EU level organizations, taking advantage of the different regional structures, preconditions and processes. Exchanging strategic knowledge across a broader range of policy fields, policy actors and governance levels also meets the growing demand for greater transparency and participation in public decisions."
The RegStrat project http://www.regstrat.net/ is a Co-ordination Action supported by the Regions of Knowledge 2-Program of the European Commission’s DG Research. The project consortium is composed of Steinbeis-Europa-Zentrum (SEZ), for Baden-Württemberg, as co-ordinator and the following partners:
IRER, the Regional Institute for Research of Lombardy, for Lombardia, Italy;
Forfás, the National Policy Advisory Board for Enterprise, Trade, Science, Technology and Innovation, for Ireland;
Fundecyt, the Foundation for the Development, for Extremadura, Spain;
WUT, Wroclaw University of Technology, for Lower Silesia, Poland; and
IBS, the Institute of Baltic Studies, for Tartu Region, Estonia.
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The Roles of Foresight in (Regional) Policy Making
http://www.innovating-regions.org/download/2-clar_mlp.pdf
Dr. Günter Clar
Stuttgart, 31 March, 2006
MLP workshop "Regional Foresight"
The Conference on Strategic Policy Intelligence for Regional Decision-Making and the second MLP Regional Foresight Workshop are organised as a joint undertaking on 30 and 31 March 2006 in Stuttgart. The events are organized by Steinbeis-Europa-Zentrum (SEZ) in collaboration with the Innovating Regions in Europe (IRE) Secretariat and the Ministries of Economic Affairs, and Research, Science and the Arts, State of Baden-Württemberg. a link
Dr. Günter Clar:
Innovation – there’s more to it than new products
- Innovations are embedded in everyday activities of enterprises and all other social actors, not only in scientific contexts
- There are many kinds of innovations: technological innovations, service innovations, societal innovations
- In addition to radical inventions, the importance of incremental improvements for competitiveness are not to be underestimated
- Innovation is closely connected to learning, in tacit forms and explicit ones
- Innovation is a complex process, from the creation of 'the new‘ to recombining the ‘old’ to embedding it in an application context, to its dissemination
- Different types of co-operation of many kinds of actors is important for successful innovation processes.
