Extract

The decisive globalization processes that have taken place in the past decade have placed increasingly severe strain on economic actors and policy makers in search of ad hoc strategies and policies to support competitiveness. At the European level, encouraged by the Lisbon Agenda (March 2000), all policy levels are contributing to the reinforcement of innovation and to the creation of the knowledge economy. Knowledge has in recent years become a key driver of growth of economic systems; and access to knowledge is generally considered a key condition for innovative activities in the modern economy. The idea of knowledge as the main discriminating element in economic and social performance was pointed out even before the Lisbon Agenda by some national governments, as in the United Kingdom, where in 1998 a White Paper, ‘Our Competitive Future: Building the Knowledge Driven Economy’, was produced by the Department of Trade and Industry. The well-known European strategy defined at the Lisbon and Luxembourg ministerial meetings (2000 and 2005) commits the Union to becoming the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world. A complex indicator for regional achievement of the Lisbon performance was circulated at the Luxembourg meeting. It concentrated on private R & D investment and expenditure, the educational level of the labour force, and productivity. An increasing flow of public resources into the scientific research system was recommended until the economic crisis (mid-2008). The recommendation is likely to be to be taken up by public authorities, giving rise to huge scientific engagement with the measurement of internal efficiency, productivity, and the impact of the research system itself (Joly, 1997; Okubo, 1997).