Science and technological development (S&T) are considered a backbone of any knowledge based economy and an asset for responding to the recent global challenges. Therefore strong links between the S&T communities of both regions are a key pillar of the bi-regional relations and of major concern of the respective policy stakeholders. Against this backgdrop the IncoNet EECA organises a series of Policy Stakeholders' Conferences allowing scientists and policy makers from both regions to exchange experiences and views on the current state of the S&T cooperation. The 2nd conference of this series titled “Best Practices in Science, Technology and Innovation Policies” was held in Moscow on April 7th and 8th, 2010.
It was stressed that the world becomes more global and complex and hence encompasses new challenges, which strongly reflects in the Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) area. Overall, international cooperation is stimulating knowledge exchange around the world specifically through mobility of researchers. From the political point of view international cooperation is a means of boosting competitions in research communities. Association to the EU Framework program is not the only way to cooperate with the EU Member States but gives the opportunity to open research systems of associated countries and make them more competitive, more innovative.
Presentations made during the conference showed the variety of spheres related to STI policy, which not only stressed the specific need to design new instruments or to reform existing instruments of STI policies. Basic and applied research, education, industry, various branches of economy are such spheres. However, observed patterns are highly dependent on the historic background of the individual countries, which needs to be considered when developing new tools for the better understanding of research systems performing.
To summarise, the conference showed the necessity:
- to perform benchmarking of STI policies,
- to work up common procedures for carrying out such exercise,
- to develop best practices on collecting statistical data and analysis.
The IncoNet EECA is willing to accept these challenges and bring the discussion forward by organising a specific workshop on “Benchmarking/ peer-review of S&T policies” in Summer 2010 (Moldova, tbc) as a next step .
Links: More information, Conference Video
