2nd EAI MEETING
Brussels, Belgium
The second preparatory meeting of the European Alliance for Innovation has taken place on April 27, 2009 at the CEPIS headquarters in Brussels, Belgium in the presence of 21 representatives from 16 European keyplayer organisations in the realm of ICT. The organisations around the table represented a broad scope of stakeholders from numerous areas of specialisation, such as Academia, Research, Industry and Regulatory bodies.
The participants have reiterated their commitment to address the prevailing challenges limiting European innovation and their interest to address such deficiencies through the general scope of activities as identified in the Verona report, thus agreeing to give priority to the following areas:
- Sharing membership access and providing common dissemination channels to maximize outreach to individual and institutional stakeholders in the European innovation process;
- Developing instruments to promote European standardization and patenting potential;
- Establishing mechanisms to recognize scientific excellence to increase European research prestige;
- Sharing best practices amongst the members and using benchmarking approaches
- Adapting a generic reward system to incentivize member participation on a grassroots level;
- Pursuing activities to support the better integration of the student community into the innovation lifecycle;
- Forming a unified voice on policy and project recommendations to increase lobbying and advisory power to national and supranational funding and regulatory organs and agencies;
- Changing the mind set regarding innovation and creating an entreneurial approach
- Designing tools that facilitate research-industry interaction and cooperation to increase business participation in the innovation activities.
