Innova - ESPON AMCER final project results presented at conference in Brussels, 27 June 2013

The Presidency of the Tuscany Regional Government, lead stakeholder of the European project AMCER - Advanced Monitoring and Coordination of EU R&D Policies at Regional Level (involving 9 regions from 7 EU member States), hosted a conference on 27 June 2013 in Brussels to present the project’s final results.

The event provided the opportunity to present concrete elements concerning:

use of data for policy coordination
how to improve monitoring and coordination of RDI activities at regional level
how to encourage the transfer of good practices at the European level

In particular, the final results strongly support the next programming period for Structural Funds and contribute to the regional Research & Innovation Smart Specialisation Strategies. In fact, national and regional authorities across Europe are called to draw up Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation, so that the next generation of EU’s Structural Funds can be used more efficiently for sustainable growth and to increase synergies between different EU, national and regional policies.

In this context, the ESPON AMCER project offered territorial evidence on the state of R&D activities and systems in 9 EU regions as well as guidelines with a set of recommendations to support the preparation of indicators for the Smart Specialisation Strategies.

Regions preparing their strategies and more generally their new Operational Programmes, were given the opportunity to understand the usefulness of AMCER, in particular concerning regional participation to FP7/Horizon 2020 and CIP/Cosme as a tool for better smart specialization strategies and coordination between European, national and regional policies.

More generally, the event sought to enhance the awareness among local, regional, national and international stakeholders concerning issues of multilevel governance applied to research, development and innovation policies and programmes; their planning monitoring and coordination; and contribute to the ongoing debate on the future of European Research and Cohesion policies, to ensure the functional integration between cohesion policy and research policy at regional level.

Mr. Gavriel Avigdor from INNOVA Europe, a company of the INNOVA Group, and coordinator of the AMCER project presented the AMCER final report at the final event.

More information on the project and to download the final report, please visit the Espon Website.

AMCER project is a Targeted Analysis conducted within the framework of the ESPON 2013 Programme, partly financed by the European Regional Development Fund.