Textile production

4.5. European initiatives in innovation in textiles
In 2009 the European Commission announced that Europe needed to boost its capacity for creativity and innovation to remain competitive. That is why the Commission declared 2009 the European Year of Creativity and Innovation. Activities during the year focused on creating an environment favourable to creativity and innovation. Emphasis was put, for instance, on education across a wide range of subjects, including mathematics, science and information and other technologies. Highlighting creativity through such skills was designed to foster problem-solving and the practical application of knowledge and ideas.
At the moment, the European Union, despite a strong record of scientific excellence, lags behind in innovation performance, especially in terms of the commercial benefits that firms manage to exploit from research. This situation is far from being in line with the Lisbon objective of making the Union ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010’. To address this problem the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry financed the Innovation Impact study.¹⁵ The overall objective of the Innovation Impact study was to understand the relationship between research, technological advancement, innovation and economic performance in the context of collaborative research and technological development (RTD) projects funded by the European Framework Programmes, in order to make these projects and programmes more useful in fostering innovation and boosting economic performance among the participants.
The results of the study are particularly relevant in view of the 7th Framework Programme (FP) and the Programme on Competitiveness and Innovation. Concerning the role of the FP-funded projects in innovation strategy, four categories of participants have been identified:
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The first category of participant has a very clear and explicit strategy as regards this organization’s involvement in EU-funded projects. For many of them, these projects play a key role. These participants, which could be referred to as ‘focused project exploiters’, are in general quite satisfied with the projects, the partnerships and the output and results they got from the projects.
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The second group is a bit more sceptical about EU projects for various reasons, such as the administrative burden, the complexity of consortium management, the lack of fit between the project time horizon and the requirements and constraints of markets, the risk of knowledge leakage, etc. In spite of these difficulties and uncertainty factors, these organizations generally keep on participating, most of the time for networking reasons – to ‘know what happens in the business’ and because it is an opportunity to conduct some peripheral research around the core R&D activities. Generally speaking, these participants have a clear innovation strategy, but one in which FP projects are only marginal.
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A third category is formed of very different companies, some with quite unusual profiles as compared to the average FP participants identified from the survey. They are also involved in FP projects for very specific and highly contextual reasons.
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Finally, some companies have no clear strategy as regards FP projects and their involvement is merely a matter of opportunity. Quite often, these ‘ad hoc project participants’ have a less clear innovation strategy, being engaged more in development and exploitation activities of an incremental nature.
Concerning firm-level characteristics and their relation to innovation impact, the study showed that mission, strategy and goals play an important role in what comes out of the projects. Large firms rarely target commercialization through FP-funded projects since they have their own dedicated R&D processes for this. SMEs, for their part, are often too focused on a core technology to be able to sustain market-driven new product development. Hence, if such firms partner up with research organizations (whose major goal is very rarely commercialization), there is very little chance for the project to produce innovation with impact in the marketplace. Some of the studied organizations showed interesting examples of how a well-developed innovation culture can support successful product development. Patenting is also an important issue for the research organizations, but it is not always the EU-funded FP projects that are the best vehicles for patenting, from their perspective. Rather, they sign closed bilateral contracts with industry partners when research findings are promising for wider commercialization.
Overall, it seems beyond doubt that the EU-funded FP projects have had, and continue to have, a major impact on a large proportion of European firms and organizations that are engaged, in one way or another, in R&D activities. The projects have penetrated many regions and countries, small and large firms, have become an indispensable means for research funding in research organizations and universities and have reinforced, and even triggered, research in a number of promising fields of science and technology development. However, R&D output and innovation impact remain very diffuse and the institutional context is more focused on control and procedural issues.