The European Innovation Council: Strategic Reflections

This second section reflects and discusses the establishment of a possible European Innovation Council (EIC) with as central aim the strengthening of European innovation policy while at the same time promoting a more open culture of innovation and entrepreneurship across Europe. The idea is to consider the EIC as an instrument to bring innovation policy in Europe in line with the characteristics of today’s open and collaborative innovation as discussed before, providing at the same time an impulse to innovative renewal at all levels of society. The success of the EIC would manifest itself in the long-term by evidence that its initiatives have created an innovation-friendly environment and new policy instruments, which significantly facilitated the growth of high-potential ‘scale-up’ firms by helping them access large markets, talent, funding and strategic decision makers. The core innovation principle of today “scale-up or fail fast” needs different policy tools than those designed in the past. The creation of complementarities and synergies, adaptations and adjustments motivating and pulling in new stakeholders across a number of existing institutions, policy instruments, constituencies would be central to the EIC. The EIC would focus on a few strategic elements, notably building synergies between different EU level instruments for innovation to maximize their added value on the European level, promoting the focus on people, openness and iterative results, and moving towards a new narrative around innovation and innovators.