Description

In the first years of the 21st century, Europe’s ambition to be a world leader for innovation was perceived by many as verging on wishful thinking. While its amount and level of expertise in science and technology, gathered in its institutional and industrial laboratories, was widely acknowledged by specialists, it seemed to be losing its competitiveness on its way to the markets. As once famously put by EU Commissioner Ján Figeľ, "Europe consistently [fell] short in turning R&D results into commercial opportunities, innovations, and jobs". The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) was set up in 2008 to address this very need for improvement. It selected three key societal and economic issues: energies for the future, information technologies, and climate change. A call for consortia was launched to bring together the best efforts from Europe’s industrialists, managers, academics, with the aim to boost innovation and create value around these issues, by integrating the three sides of the "Knowledge Triangle": higher education, research, and business. Along with the other two consortia, Climate-KIC was selected in 2009, focusing on climate change mitigation and adaptation. It is now a growing and thriving community of more than 200 partners, international corporate groups, SME’s, universities, research centres, public bodies, NGO’s, meeting across five national centres and a network of regional hubs. Through a survey of Climate-KIC’s brief history and quickly growing portfolio of activities, ranging from multinational and multi-sector innovation projects to summer schools centred on entrepreneurship and acceleration programmes for start-ups, we shall reflect on how the differences between national and local cultures and mentalities within Europe can create specific problems, but also stimulate inventive new ways to work together, and which original tools we have been developing to accelerate synergies. Even with a large consensus in our community about the pressing necessity to act on climate change mitigation and adaptation, and to demonstrate the possibility of such action, concrete innovation in the field of climate change remains a hugely complex challenge. It involves apparently disconnected markets, many of which are still emerging or not even clearly identified. It also mixes technological, societal and regulatory aspects, at multiple scales, from the neighbourhood to the continent and beyond. We shall take examples of individual projects under development, and see how our still young European consortium is starting to cluster small steps, with quick results, into action on a larger scale and with longer term impact.