Innovation is producing something new.
Whether this is a service or a product or a new market that is being developed, that
to me is innovation.
Invention is turning money into ideas and innovation is turning ideas into money.
Innovation is really the catalyst for economic growth.
In order for companies to grow and succeed, they need to be innovative.
That is simply the nature of today's economy.
The world has changed and so if Europe doesn't innovate, the others won't stop doing it for
our sake.
We have to, if we want to or not.
It's the introduction of a new process or product.
And that can occur whether it's in a business setting or government setting or a philanthropic
social setting.
Creating value for users and adding new ways of doing things that people haven't thought
of before and just making it intuitively useful.
Innovation is all about turning ideas into commercially viable opportunities which create
jobs, create new companies, and create the growth that we need in Europe.
It's not so much about figuring out how to make the next billion dollars or how to create
big new industries, but rather bringing tools closer to people, figuring out new more efficient
ways of doing things that hadn't been thought of before.
We need new ways to foster innovation in today's economy.
It's as simple as that.
Without innovation, companies die and without innovation, ultimately, societies die too.
Innovation means that we bring all of the wonderful scientific research that we have
all the way along a chain till we get it into products, we sell it on the market, we develop
products and create products that the markets are there for, and that people will want to
buy.
And that's, at the end of the day, how we can develop research to retail.
An improvement of something that already exists or introducing something totally new.
It's not only about technology, it's also about organisation.
Perhaps turning traditional ways of doing things upside down and making it much more
effective and therefore having a more broader reach and much bigger audience.
It's gone from more of a narrow sense about science and technology to a much broader sense,
encompassing a whole panoply of things including entrepreneurship, issues about information
and communication technologies, social innovation - how do we use innovation to address what
I would call non-market issues like climate change or infections diseases.
Innovation is going to be, looking forward in to the future, how we can use technology
and those ideas and assessments to drive the future economies of the EU.
We need to be innovative in education, healthcare, electricity supply, energy, traffic.
Governments obviously should help in developing encouraging policies.
They should make sure that people have the space to take controlled risk, to move forward,
they should empower people to move forward.
Anything that regulators or policymakers in general can do to improve links between the
education sector and the business sector will help.
There's a chasm at the moment in Europe and that chasm needs to be reduced massively if
we're going to have this conversion of ideas into business opportunities.
There is a role for them as a facilitator, there's a role for them as an enabler, but
there is above all a role for them within the Commission itself - to innovate.
And I think that working in different ways and using different working methods is going
to be a key for the Commission to innovate itself.
We need some foundation public policies to be put in place.
We need support for open standards.
We need, arguably, new digital public goods for a knowledge based economy including more
open access publishing and science, better access to digital libraries and knowledge
assets that people can reuse and repurpose.
EIT is designated as one of these organisations that are very much looking at impact of innovation.
So at the end of the day we have our business calls, our knowledge and innovation communities
have business calls, and they will have to live up to that.
So there's clear leadership, there is timely deliverables of results year after year after
year.
And I believe this is the type of stuff that also now should be incurred by policy very
much.
We would like the governments to let us innovate, I suppose.
To give a level playing field and to consider that innovation is good, that innovation is
going to bring benefits to the consumer, that it's going to create jobs and it's going to
create wealth.
We need to bring a decorate use of innovation close to the people.
We work for them, innovation works for them, and the people have to embrace the idea of
innovation in their lives.