New European initiative focuses on innovation


6 Oct 2010

A large-scale European Union initiative will be launched today that hopes to place Europe among the best researchers and innovators in the market today.

The Innovation Flagship Union, which will be launched by Ireland’s European Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, has been designed to remove obstacles to innovation by mobilising greater venture capital and pushing European research and commercialisation policies up the political agenda.

The initiative is portrayed as key to achieving the goals set out in its ‘Europe 2020’ strategy, which aims for “smart, sustainable and inclusive growth” and pushes Europe to come out of the financial crisis as a unified, stronger entity.

Social cohesion

The Innovation Flagship Union will focus on social cohesion, aim at helping individual countries, as well as Europe, in an attempt to push innovation to a level that can compete globally.

“EU targets for 2020 that will steer the process and be translated into national targets: for employment; for research and innovation; for climate change and energy; for education; and for combating poverty. They represent the direction we should take and will mean we can measure our success,” said European Commission President José Manuel Barosso in the Europe 2020 report.