Ecofin agrees that R&D and innovation are key to achieving Lisbon targets
Progress on fostering the appropriate conditions to help innovation, research and development was urged at a meeting of the of the EU Member States' finance ministers, the Ecofin Council, on 22 January in Brussels. The Council members, joined by Commissioners Solbes (monetary affairs), Bolkestein (internal market) and Schreyer (budget), endorsed a report from the Economic policy committee on research and development which underlines the need for the EU and Member States to ensure that an appropriate framework is in place to foster innovation. The report also made a number of recommendations for action both at national and European level. The EU should, it claimed, develop a full range of intellectual property protection at Community level and promote its use. The EU's Sixth Framework programme should help in creating networking and knowledge flows across Europe through the promotion of research mobility and networking of research and industry. It also calls for the Community state aid framework for R&D to ensure that aid can meet specific market failures across innovation systems, without distorting the market in the process. There are also measures which the Member States need to address. These include improving the effectiveness of their publicly-funded research, strengthening links between industry and research and analysing a mix of direct instruments and market-based incentives to stimulate private R&D. The report also suggests that Member States stimulate early stage investment through an adequate financial and regulatory framework and provide more assistance to SMEs on the intellectual property issues. The report, endorsed by the Ecofin Council, will be forwarded for discussion at the forthcoming Barcelona Council in March. European Commission President, Romano Prodi, had said several days before the Ecofin Council that he considered R&D essential to attaining the goal set at the Lisbon summit, of making Europe the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010.