Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-05-23-Speech-3-377"
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"Mr President, honourable Members, the creation of growth and employment was the urgent task undertaken by the Commission when it took office. I believe we are making excellent progress. The general economic situation in Europe is better than it has been for a long time, but we have not yet been able to reverse the trend. We must ensure that this growth is sustainable.
I am very grateful to you for attaching such significance to small businesses in particular, for it is indeed here that the greatest potential for innovation is to be found, and it is important that access to financial resources be made easier for them – which is precisely what we are doing by means of the competitiveness and innovation programme, which is specifically aimed at small and medium-sized innovative enterprises.
We also agree on the outstanding significance of eco-innovation, which will be a very major issue in the years ahead of us, for both it and energy efficiency are areas in which innovative European solutions can make headway on the global market, making us more competitive internationally and thereby also capable of bringing about growth and creating new jobs.
I get the impression that there is, to a large degree, agreement between this House, the Council and the Commission that the continued improvement and promotion of innovation is indispensable if we are to keep Europe on course for success; we all know what is needed, so what matters now is that we should all actually do it.
That is why we need the appropriate boundary conditions, which allow European businesses to further improve their competitiveness. A key factor in this is Europe’s innovative strength and its ability to find practical and commercial applications for our outstanding research results. We must compete on the basis of higher standards and better quality. We must be better than the others. We must apply the highest standards to the quality of our products. We must be technological leaders. New technologies, new processes, new products that give us the edge over others, these give us an opportunity.
I should like to mention two very recent examples of how innovative ideas can increase the competitiveness of companies. Take innovative sensors for airbags. These have turned airbags from an excellent but unaffordable idea into a value-for-money, surface-covering item of safety equipment in use all over the world. At present 50 million of these sensors are produced annually on this basis. They are no longer used exclusively in the motor industry, but are also found in, for example, mobile phones, laptops and DNA chips.
A quite different success story is the invention of a biodegradable plastic bag. A tiny group of scientists invented this environmentally friendly product and turned the patent to good account in the market. In the space of a few years this has grown into a successful medium-size business with a turnover of EUR 50 million and 60 patents – and the trend is upwards. These are only two examples from the hundreds, if not thousands of cases found every year in Europe, which we need to create employment and maintain it in the long term.
I am very grateful to the European Parliament and the rapporteur Mr Gierek for their support of our innovation strategy. That is particularly true of the areas also identified as a priority by the Council of Europe in December 2006. These are the topics to which we are devoting special efforts at present. They include, for example, our policy of strengthening clusters and the initiatives on creating and stimulating leading-edge markets, as part of which we shall be presenting before the end of the year after consultation with the interested groups a proposal for the establishment of several innovative leading-edge markets.
Something else we are using in support of innovation is standardisation – a term that covers a great deal, and a communication on this subject is planned for the autumn of this year.
The allocation of public funds also needs to be done more with a view to the more targeted support of innovation, and we have done this by drafting the guidelines for the use of the Structural Funds accordingly and by adapting the aid rules in such a way that innovation has to be capable of being more strongly promoted than formerly.
I regard the improved protection of intellectual property as most especially important, for it is crucial not only at the European level but also in the global context. As the rapporteur rightly said, small and medium-sized enterprises find it difficult to secure what is rightfully theirs where intellectual property rights are concerned, and the Commission is working on a strategy for helping them do this.
I would also like to point out that such rights have to be affordable and of high quality, and it is for that reason that the advancement of the Community patent is crucial in terms of the competitiveness of our economy, for the present state of affairs in patent policy is a serious hindrance to its ability to compete."@en1
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