Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-05-17-Speech-3-290"
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"en.20000517.14.3-290"2
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"Mr President, I have great pleasure in responding on behalf of the EPP and ED Group, and on behalf of my colleague, Mrs Quisthoudt-Rowohl, who was the shadow rapporteur in the Industry Committee but who unfortunately cannot be here tonight. I have the pleasure of shadowing Mr MacCormick in the Legal Affairs Committee. You have already heard that this is indeed a formidable combination and an extremely comprehensive and thorough report from Mrs Plooij-Van Gorsel, but Mr MacCormick added his own distinctive touches to the report, the flavour of which you have just heard.
Clearly, the thrust of the Commission’s thinking that has gone into this report and indeed our response has focused on two aspects: competitiveness and coordination, because research capability combined with the ability to translate that research into products and services of real commercial value is going to be the key to the competitiveness of the European Union and the enlarged Union into this new century.
We really need to make better use of all the intellectual capabilities that we have across the European Union by improving ways of working together, particularly by better focusing our efforts, by not duplicating that work, by bringing together the original thinkers that Mr MacCormick was talking about. Anyone who has worked in research will know that if you get people together you spark new and creative ideas all the time. That activity cannot really be achieved by a lot of centralisation. The Commission has a job to do as a catalyst for the process. As Mr MacCormick says, we have to get people across the Union together talking region to region, university to university. We have to have better information networks, we have to have this exchange of information horizontally, not coming into the centre and going out again.
We have now fantastic new tools to be able to do that. After all, the Internet was a tool intended to facilitate research networking. That is what it was originally designed to do and we now have the ability to use it and to think about how we are going to develop the telecommunications capability, the ways of using it, the structure that we talked about in our early debate on telecommunications, the idea of virtual centres of excellence. That, I think, is a factor of very great importance in trying to achieve this focus and this synthesis of ideas. If anything should be brought forward very quickly in a pilot stage by Mr Busquin and his team, it is the idea of moving into the virtual centres of excellence and achieving progress in certain key areas.
The second point I want to make links in with our competitiveness. I echo very much the closing phrases of Mrs Plooij-Van Gorsel to us just now: we have to encourage research and development of skills on taking products to market. We have to improve the ways that we do that. The processes of original design are prototyping, testing and making. We have to reduce the time to market, to take these ideas and move them out to consumers as soon as possible, to make products simply, quickly, more effectively, more flexibly. Those are very important skills that we need to develop and research has a very important part to play in that. In welcoming Mrs Plooij-Van Gorsel’s report, we are anticipating the next stage, Mr Busquin, in meeting these challenges that we have thrown down. We look to you to turn these proposals into tangible ideas to achieve the objectives that we all share."@en1
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