Innovation: How Europe can take off
Every EU government supports innovation, believing that it will help Europe to meet the numerous economic, social and environmental challenges that it faces. But innovation is a vague concept and there is disagreement on what policies best promote it. The articles in this report discuss what innovation entails and what policy-makers can do to encourage it. There is general agreement that innovation is a broader and more 'democratic' process than what goes on in companies' research and development laboratories. More controversially, however, some authors believe that an innovative society requires 'creative destruction', and that Europe has failed to accept the social and economic dislocations that a more innovative economy must entail.