On Tuesday 28th November Czech stakeholders met in the Prague City Hall to discuss trends in transport innovation. They talked about the Transport Innovation Framework Report which is currently being prepared and which will map innovation capacity in Prague and in other project partners regions.
The meeting focussed on the Transport Innovation Framework Report (TIFR). The main purpose was to compare the up to now information with the opinion of the attending stakeholders. The participants were familiarized with the selected statistics of the share of Prague‘s industry and the existing development strategies and documents dealing with the smart specialization in Prague were introduced. Then the tools of RTDI investments support, existing technological incubators in Prague and innovative mechanisms and factors were presented. The stakeholders had several comments on such topics. On the one hand, the participants emphasised an own initiative of Prague when it comes to the innovations, on the other hand the need of implementation of the yet successful conceptual solutions is necessary, too. Mr. Vít Čaban, the representative of Section of Strategies and Entrepreneurship Support of City Hall stated the current possibilities and capacities of innovation vouchers. In the end of the presentation the SWOT analysis of the current innovation environment was introduced and the following discussion concerned the relationship of academic and private sector and the manner of their cooperation.
The following discussion was devoted mainly to the character of cooperation between academic and private sector in research and development. The participants repeatedly mentioned that the collaboration of the university research teams and private companies is not very often under the way of the official partnership, but has rather an informal character. That means that the researchers are usually hired as the external experts by the companies. Firstly, this form of cooperation is problematic in terms of sharing and commodification of the university know-how. Secondly, it is also far less possible to make any evidence or statistics about the relationship of private and academic sectors.
Another discussed topic was a perspective of alternative fuels. Mrs. Renáta Slabá, the representative of Ministry of Transport declared, that the electromobility, currently undergoing the dynamic development and testing in automotive industry is not such a perspective resource of energy as hydrogen. Hydrogen seems to have the better preconditions to become the dominant resource. The stakeholders also mentioned the demanding administrative agenda concerning the subsidies and consequently lower rate of successful project applications. Some of the innovative solutions are also relevant for the other operational programmes – one of such examples is carsharing supposed to be supported within Operational Programme Transport.
Finally, all the stakeholders have been invited to the international thematic workshop and study visit that will be hosted by City Hall of Prague from 27th until 28th February. The main topic of the workshop will be the Low-carbon transportation. Both Czech and foreign project partners will present their examples of best practices and successful implementation of the transport innovation.
