Among the priority issues included in the agenda for Heads of State and Government meeting at the Council of the EU on 4 February, the debate focused on the future of innovation in the European Union. In their conclusions, EU leaders underlined that investing in education, research, technology and innovation is a key driver of growth, and that innovative ideas will help create growth and quality jobs.

Under this approach, the European Council underlined the need for the implementation of a strategic and integrated approach to boosting innovation and taking full advantage of Europe's intellectual capital, in order to benefit citizens, companies and European researchers.

With this objective, the Council noted the trends and developments revealed by the current Commission innovation scoreboard, highlighting the importance to develop a single integrated indicator to allow a better monitoring of progress in innovation. If Europe wants to reduce the innovation gap with its main competitors, the United States and Japan, it must achieve a unified research area to attract talent and investment. Remaining gaps must be addressed rapidly and the European Research Area completed by 2014 to create a genuine single market for knowledge, research and innovation.

Additional efforts must be done in particular to improve the mobility and career prospects of researchers, the mobility of graduate students and the attractiveness of Europe for foreign researchers, as well as improving dissemination of information about EU funding for R&D projects, whilst respecting intellectual property rights, notably through the establishment of an inventory of EU-funded R&D, linked to similar inventories of R&D programmes funded at national level.

Creating a favourable environment for innovation as a shared challenge

Among its recommendations, the Council pointed out the need to make efforts in order to lift remaining legal and administrative obstacles to the cross-border operation of venture capital, and has invited the Commission to present proposals in this sense by the end of 2011 in order to meet the needs of growing innovative companies through a market-based approach and exploring the feasibility of the Small Business Innovation Research Scheme.

Accelerate, simplify and modernize standardization procedures; revise public procurement rules in order to make generally public procurement better geared to creating greater demand for innovative goods and services; or explore options for setting up an intellectual property rights valorisation instrument at European level, in particular to ease SMEs' access to the knowledge market, are some of the issues where the Commission has been invited to take action.

Council also reminded the crucial role of the simplification of EU instruments aimed at fostering R&D&I in order to facilitate their take-up by the best scientists and the most innovative companies. It is therefore particularly important to reach agreement between the relevant institutions for a new balance between trust and control and between risk taking and risk avoidance.