VILNIUS, LITHUANIA – On September 21-22 the international seminar "Creating an Effective Innovation Ecosystem" was held in the Research and Higher Education Monitoring and Analysis centre (MOSTA). The training was conducted by experts from the Swedish research institute Nordregio.
"Various ratings indicate that Lithuania is moderately interested in innovation. The weakest place in our innovation ecosystem is performance: we have been investing a lot in innovation in recent years, and the return on investment is not growing as fast as we would like. The World Innovation Index reveals that Lithuania is only 87th in terms of innovative efficiency and is only ahead of Greece when compared to the older EU members," Ramojus Reimeris, head of MOSTA, said.
R. Reimeris points out that the Nordic countries are European innovation leaders, which is why it is crucial for Lithuania to use their best practices to enhance the efficiency of the innovation ecosystem. "There was a lack of coordination in the development process of the Lithuanian innovation ecosystem institutional framework, and therefore the effectiveness of our innovation ecosystem is limited. Monitoring performance in Lithuania is a fairly new phenomenon, so we have to take good examples from Scandinavian countries and while critically evaluating them, look for the ways to apply them," R. Reimeris told.
Experts from Swedish research institute Nordregio, introduced the main obstacles hindering innovation ecosystem performance. According to experts, the barriers may vary depending on the specifics of the region, for example, the main weakness of peripheral regions is human capital, while metropolitan areas face coordination problems and fragmentation of innovation centers. Nordregio experts also shared examples of methodologies for assessing innovation efficiency. The trainees tried to adapt them to the Lithuanian environment.
The seminar was attended by the representatives from the Science, Innovation and Technology Agency, the Lithuanian Innovation Center, Lithuanian Parliament, the Ministry of Education and Science and Higher education institutions.
MOSTA workshop is part of the INKREASE project. The aim of this project is to improve the innovation capacity of the regions involved. The main objective is to integrate tools and measures into different partners' regional strategies that increase the efficiency of various innovative ecosystems, strengthen research and business cooperation and commercialization of research results.
