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17/02/2010
Filas at the 2nd KIS Partnering Forum
The 2nd KIS Partnering Forum, which was held in Rome on February 11- 12, 2010, gathered over 140 innovation practitioners, policy makers, companies, service providers and investors.
The two-day KIS forum centred on discussing the latest trends and developments in Knowledge Intensive Services and provided an excellent opportunity for networking and finding new partnerships with other companies. In particular, the forum focused on Energy and Environmental Services, ICT and Digital Media and Mobile Services and Space.
Mr. Reinhard Büscher from the European Commission DG Enterprise and Industry urged KIS partnerships (funded by the Europe INNOVA Initiative) “to make a real impact in terms of innovation and the creation of new jobs through service innovation.”
“Service innovation,” Mr. Büscher declared, “finally gets the political recognition it deserves. We see that more and more governments are interested in service innovation as a driver of innovation and job creation, often in combination with promoting the use of ICT and also in conjunction with sector-specific initiatives, such as in support of creative industries.”
Filas General Manager Stefano Turi also underlined the importance of knowledge-intensive services. “The role of regional policies is key to facilitate the growth of innovation capacity within SMEs by focusing not only on specific sectors but also on the role of knowledge-intensive services,” Turi explained. “In the last decade, Innovative services have continued to outperform most other sectors (including the manufacturing sector), and have accordingly attracted a good deal of research, businesses and policy attention.”
“In this perspective,” Mr. Turi added, “the Lazio Region, through Filas, its financial development agency, has launched a variety of measures since 2000. Specific support schemes have been designed and deployed for the key innovative clusters of the region, namely aerospace, life sciences, technologies for cultural heritage and audiovisuals.
In her concluding remarks, Mette Quinn, DG Enterprise and Industry, recapped the main issues discussed during the two-day event. “Supporting knowledge intensive services,” Ms. Quinn pointed out, “is not only a goal in itself, but it also helps other industries to become more innovative.” And voucher schemes are a clear example of this, she added.
Voucher schemes do not only offer better and less bureaucratic ways of innovation support if implemented in a simple straightforward manner, but they also help create professional knowledge intensive services in areas where they were not found before.
“Our projects,” Mette Quinn concluded, “are encouraged to experiment with these new forms of innovation support, with a view to mobilise more and better innovation support in Europe. As Reinhard [Büscher] said yesterday, this will be the main benchmark against which we will assess the success or failure of our initiative.”
The Forum was organized by the Knowledge Intensive Services – Innovation Platform with the support of the BIC Lazio Business Innovation Centre.
KIS-IP is a European initiative funded under Europe INNOVA, with the aim to accelerate the take-up of service innovations in Europe.
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