Recipe for open strategic autonomy that leaves no one and no place behind

Industrial innovation, integration of social and territorial cohesion, increased institutional capacity and more cooperation between researchers and practitioners. These are the keys to open strategic autonomy while leaving no one and no place behind, says the recent Joint Research Centre policy brief.

This document underlines that it is essential to focus industrial innovation on EU-wide capacities in critical sectors and technologies, while strengthening EU’s internal market and maintaining a responsible openness. 

It also highlights the need to integrate social and territorial cohesion perspectives to address digital and green gaps, upskill the workforce and engage all relevant stakeholders to identify areas for investment. The third pillar is improving the collaboration between policy areas, public and private actors and government levels. Such institutional capacity and good governance are prerequisites for truly transformative innovation policies. Finally, further cooperation between researchers and practitioners is necessary to monitor and evaluate progress, anticipate emerging difficulties and provide evidence to underpin policy decisions.

The brief sums up the main outcomes of CONCORDi Conference, the European Conference on Corporate R&D and Innovation, and encapsulates in a few pages the contributions of more than 140 speakers, covering the broad scientific and policy areas that the open strategic autonomy embraces. The conference included discussions on trade, competition, financing innovation, policy coordination and monitoring evolution. It hosted over 30 academic sessions, 19 keynote speeches & exhibited a selection of 20 scientific posters.

Organised in association with the OECD and the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the latest edition of CONCORDi set itself the goal to inform EU’s research, innovation and industry policy responses to OSA. Glenn Magerman and Alberto Palazzolo, from ECARES at Université Libre de Bruxelles, received the Best Paper Award 2023 for their research on supply chains and regional inequalities in the EU.

During the event, he JRC granted its first ever Fair and Sustainable Economy Award to Ricardo Hausmann, Professor at Harvard University, and keynote speaker of CONCORDI 2023. This award acknowledged Hausmann’s “pioneer and outstanding scientific contributions to Economic Complexity” and its relevance for transformative place-based innovation policies. Such innovation policies are at the core of JRC’s work with the Committee of the regions on Partnerships for Regional Innovation with over 70 European territories.  The work to provide tools that facilitate and boost innovation policies with transformative potential will continue in 2024 with the release of the ACTIONBook 2.0. 

Related links

A resilient, competitive, fair and sustainable EU: Industrial Innovation for Open Strategic Autonomy

Economics of Industrial Research and Innovation

9th European Conference on Corporate R&D and Innovation CONCORDi 2023