The European Commission recently established the European Service Innovation Centre (ESIC) to support regions in the design of better policies to transform existing industries and to boost emerging ones.
First, the Centre will provide a concrete customized support service to six model demonstrator regions. Those regions are Basque Country, The Canary Islands, Emilia-Romagna, Luxembourg, Northern Ireland and Upper Austria. They were selected by the European Commission DG Enterprise and Industry through an informal call for expression of interest.
ESIC will analyze the service innovation policies in these regions through a peer-review “stress test”, with the aim of identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the innovation support system and the potential barriers to, and scope for enhanced policy action for, achieving maximum impact.
ESIC will provide each region with recommendations on how to improve the policy framework to better capitalize on service innovation.
Furthermore, ESIC will collect experience data and evidence from the implementation of service innovation policies in Europe and will publish a European service innovation Scoreboard to make known the latest trends observed in those regions and to emphasize their progress.
The aim is to raise general awareness amongst policy-makers about the role of service innovation in boosting economic development and industrial transformation.
The mission of ESIC is thus to gather information about and analyze these developments in order to promote effective service innovation policies and practices in the European Union.
The diffusion of information on those best policies and practices will enable the regions to choose the most effective means of supporting service innovation and to ensure the transformation and upgrading of traditional economic sectors and industries into more productive, competitive and high-value-added business ecosystems.
