What is lacking in Europe’s innovation policy

Here is a thought about Europe’s innovation policy I wrote as a comment on Innovation Unlimited, a forum collecting ideas for “reinventing Europe through innovation”.

1. Left and right brain innovation

European policy makers have long seen innovation as a left brain thing: scientific, rational, processed, structured, top-down…
Europe has been pretty good in doing that. Many European companies are world leaders in a number of key sector, like aerospace, chemistry, automotive, etc.

But innovation is also a right brain stuff, based on creativity, imagination, entrepreneurship, emotional behaviour, human and social relationship, bottom-up… This part needs informality, serendipity, interactivity, unleashed thinking…
Those later aspects are as important to drive the innovation potential up. To let right brain innovation grow, we need to set up open and inspiring environments (physical or virtual), to ease and amplify human interactions, to free up radical imagination, etc.
On that field, though, Europe is lagging behind.
We use to say that succesful companies have managed to create a right balance between left and right brain. So can it be with economies.

2. Untapped bed of creativity and innovation within corporations

Huge innovation potentials sleep in employees head, untapped by their employers. Top-down, command management focuses on efficiency at the expense of creativity and side moves. Hereabove, “Job” told about management innovation. Perhaps is it the most difficult to achieve. However, there lies one of the biggest innovation tank we can dream of.
A.o., it can pave the way for more intrapreneurship, then more innovation.

3. The tight link between entrepreneurship, innovation and culture

Should it be within (intra) or outside an organisation, innovation comes with entrepreneurship. Foster people to speak up, believe in their skills and ideas, help them interact with the best experts to make the case for their project, will boost innovation.
A European economy with many startups, well connected, with access to bigger corporation’s open innovation processes, or just cluster of SME’s, could sparks.
For sure, that is a matter of culture. Europe should lead by as many examples as possible. We should also tell the story of a changing economical environment. Why are we heading toward a more innovative economy ? A.o., because knowledge, today, is almost everywhere. Globalisation has made the world economy so fluid that, soon, anyone can become a partner or a competitor. Change comes from the outside as well.

“Journalism is key to bring a culture of innovation into the society”