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Parliament reports on Innovation Green Paper

The European Parliament's Committee on Research, Technological Development and Energy unanimously adopted a report on the Commission's Green Paper on Innovation at its meeting in Brussels on 7 May 1996. In its report, the Committee suggests that the Green Paper does not conta...

The European Parliament's Committee on Research, Technological Development and Energy unanimously adopted a report on the Commission's Green Paper on Innovation at its meeting in Brussels on 7 May 1996. In its report, the Committee suggests that the Green Paper does not contain a sufficiently rigorous analysis of the current state of innovation in the European Union, and that there is insufficient distinction between the different aims necessary for promotion of both competition and cooperation in RTD. Cooperation and coordination between EU and Member States' research policies is also lacking. The Committee calls on the European Community to make a greater commitment to the diffusion of technical know-how within its borders. In the context of the Community's specific RTD programmes, the Committee calls for increased support for both the INNOVATION and Training and Mobility of Researchers (TMR) programmes, as well as greater cooperation between these and other specific RTD programmes and the research/industry task forces. Concrete plans for the dissemination and exploitation of results should be an integral part of the design of every Community RTD programme, according to the report. As regards the task forces, the Committee regrets that they, and their areas of interest, were chosen internally by the Commission, with little transparency, and also that they have thus far not enhanced coordination between national and Community research policies. The Committee calls on the Commission to establish a task force to draw up a common methodology for the specific RTD programmes to foster the dissemination and exploitation of RTD projects' results, as recommended in the mid-term review of the VALUE II programme in 1994. Community research policy should focus on research that is interdisciplinary, application-oriented and network-driven. Networks should include partners from all stages of the value chain, and should involve industrial research organizations and firms as well as academic and other non-industrial research institutions. The Committee also recommends that greater attention be paid to the divergent needs of SMEs in the RTD process, particularly in regard to access to finance. Finally, the Committee recognizes the importance of innovation as regards its social and educational aspects. The Committee's report should be adopted by the full Parliament in early June. It will then be submitted to the Commission.

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