Growing complexity of societal challenges demands international research

On 26 January the Joint Institute for Innovation Policy (JIIP) held her official opening congress in Brussels. Around 60 representatives from several European research institutes, ministries and the European Commission discussed the question how bundling of European research capacity can reinforce the international position of Europe in the field of research and the role of research institutes like TNO in this.

The domain of Research and Technology Organisations (RTOs) is changing rapidly in view of external forces. Following this, the roles, positions and working methods of RTOs are also changing.

Societal problems are becoming increasingly complex and involve several countries or as often Europe or the world as a whole. Finding solutions asks for new and permanent collaboration between technological research, socio-economic analysis and policy research.


From national to European
The conference led to the striking observation that although RTOs are quite actively exploring internationalization and building new cross-border alliances, demand for applied research is still largely nationally organized. In the EU Joint Programming initiative the member states plan to build joint and well coordinated research programs on major societal challenges. In a next step supply and demand for research at the European level needs to be better tuned.

JIIP
In JIIP four major European RTOs, TNO (Netherlands), VTT (Finland), JOANNEUM RESEARCH (Austria) and Tecnalia (Spain), work together on research and advice to support the internationalization of innovation systems and innovation policies. Its goal is to collaborate, to pool of resources and to share experience from four countries in order to jointly undertake larger and more complex projects with greater impact.

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