The scientific and technical arm of the European Commission invited industry professionals to gather last week to address how financial constraints influence innovation and impact growth and competitiveness within the sector.
The programme included a focus on factors such as financial sources, growth strategies and the role of public policies for cosmetic companies amongst others.
In addition to the 20 papers presented and discussed, there were keynote addresses by Mariana Mazzucato, RM Phillips Professor in Science and Technology Policy at the University of Sussex (United Kingdom) and Alexander Popov, Economist at the European Central Bank.
Overall, JRC reps say over one hundred international experts addressed areas such as how financial constraints influence innovation, impact companies’ growth and competitiveness and what the related main obstacles are.
“The empirical evidence presented at the conference, while confirming the existence of a relation between financial constraints and the growth of innovative companies, contained novel interesting conclusions bearing relevant policy implications,” they reported.
‘Policy interventions and positive impacts'
As aforementioned, experts on the day firstly revealed a direct correlation between financial constraints and innovation, they then moved on to hone in on other important external barriers, such as providing evidence of important demand-side problems which policies need also to address.
"Concerning the assessment of policy interventions, results confirm the positive impact of measures such as tax credits and subsidies," they revealed.
However, they added that the great heterogeneity of companies and framework conditions across countries and regions, call for much more systematic and comprehensive policy analysis and monitoring of instruments, as well as proper indicators.
According to the EC appointed body, the salient conclusion of the conference has been the call from both scientists and policy makers to establish a stronger network of R&D and innovation policy evaluators, to support the proper implementation of the up-coming European financial support instruments agreed for the period 2014-2020.