Director General Petri Peltonen is head of the Innovation Department at the Finnish Ministry of Employment and the Economy.
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Why are you presenting the strategy here today to such a wide audience?
We want to test our ideas and see how the Finnish strategy works at European level, to share our lessons learned and see how our strategy is meeting the European policy objectives and to see other member states' views and opinions about our strategy. We hope to give a contribution to the EU level and improve our policy document through the discussions we have.
What was the role of Esko Aho in this report?
He was a bit in a similar role as he was in 2006 when drafting the 'Creating an innovative Europe' strategy. He comes from outside the existing establishment, also in Finland, is an independent player and a free thinker. We put him in a similar position to challenge the existing policies and, hopefully, come up with a strategy which is clearly something new.
Can this proposal for Finland's innovation strategy be considered as a national follow-up on the 2006 report?
To an extent yes, I think it is an implementation plan for that in Finland. There are features in our strategy that are coming from that report while, for example, the role of markets and users was clearly spelled out in it. And we are now taking that seriously and it is evident that having the user and market orientation calls for change in national policies and in particular in the way policies are implemented in different organisations.
What is inherently new in this strategy compared both to the existing Finnish innovation strategy and those of other EU countries?
This is no rocket-science that we've done in Finland. As the Commission representative said, Finland is sort of now reflecting the most recent and relevant innovation policies and policy research developments in its strategy: the role of open innovation, users and market. What is new is that we are now building these into concrete implementation of our policies. If you like, we are going from words to deeds.
Something slightly unique compared to Aho report and discussion in the EU is the wide definition of innovation. It is scientific and technological, but it is also about many non-scientific and non-technological features. Being able to develop both at same level of resources and seriousness is probably something new Finland is doing. Examples of this include innovation in management, workplace and services.
How do you plan to encourage entrepreneurship?
We have bold proposals, honestly. It is still a proposal for the government and there are politically sensitive issues in the proposal, such as taxation. There are clear recommendations that there should be tax incentives for private investors investing in risky businesses as well as tax incentives for attracting qualified people from abroad with lower tax rates than they would normally see in Finland.
We are also introducing new funding schemes through Tekes, such as new European young innovative company funds, which is something reasonably radical in Finland because up to €1 million of public money can be invested in a growth company. These are at least some ways to build more incentives for entrepreneurship in Finland.
What will change at management level?
Both the government ministry group for economic policy and the science and technology policy council will be reorganised so that they will have a clear strong role in managing innovation policy in Finland.
What are the non-scientific and non-technological innovation aspects and how will they be implemented?
These include design, branding, business concepts, production and workplace innovation – thus the soft side of innovation. Knowledge-based competitive advantage is created from many non-technological and scientific sources of knowledge and being able to take those in the same development sphere as science and technology is an opportunity for us.
What are the next steps towards the adoption of this proposal?
The government will take a decision on it in August after which it is passed to the Parliament for discussion. Previous parliamentary discussion on science and technology policy was held some 20 years ago. So it is time to have a political debate about it. I don't think there are any major disparities and regardless political orientation all are in favour of innovation policy. Having parliament level discussion on the policy document gives us very strong backing then to make the necessary changes in the innovation organisations that are now implementing the policies.
What about the EU's capacity to boost innovation?
Honestly the biggest problem with the EU and especially the Commission is that it is so split into isolated directorates, that even the term 'innovation' is very difficult. The science and enterprise directorates are not at all able to develop policies together. Here I have clear concerns. Innovation requires broad scale developments on several sectors at the same time. The way the Commission is structured today makes it very difficult for it to address issue that are broader than one single directorate.
Can the EIT solve this division?
It is a step towards the right direction. KICs are probably attracting the best talent to Europe and in that sense it is a right step. But there are already other initiatives as well, such as the JTIs, and it is now time to - rather than coming up with new initiatives one after the other - to make sure that the existing initiatives are kicked-off and fully functional before coming up with yet another EIT-type of initiative.
