Ján Figel'-Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture, and Youth

Education, Research, Innovation

Reception hosted by the European Australian Business Council

Sydney, 18 April 2007

Check against delivery

Ladies and Gentlemen,

First of all, let me tell you that I am really happy to be here. It is important for me to meet representatives of the business world during these few days in Australia.

And I am happy that this meeting takes place with the European Australian Business Council, which is an ideal bridge between the two business communities.

Today I would like to have an exchange of views with you on three topics that are central to my portfolio as European Commissioner. I would like to talk about lifelong learning , innovation and the European Institute of Technology .

I will start with lifelong learning.

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Only one generation ago, it was not difficult to establish the knowledge and skills that young people would need to acquire through education and would use for the rest of their lives.

But this is no longer the case.

In the new modes of production, people can no longer expect to spend their whole life in the same job, or even in the same sector. Career paths change in ways that no one can predict.

The jobs today's students will have tomorrow may not even exist today. And the knowledge required to carry them out may be knowledge that we do not teach yet.

Acquiring a store of specific knowledge, as was common in traditional learning, is no longer enough. What counts today is being creative and adaptable . In a phrase: what counts today is learning to learn.

Furthermore, changes in industry and the workplace already require new skills. Today's business is internationalised, hierarchies tend to be flatter, and companies increasingly rely on teamwork.

Workers and managers alike should begin to develop social, cultural and communication skills on top of their traditional know-how.

How can we prepare young people for this increased complexity? Also, how can we help older generations to update their knowledge and skills?

A first answer is to build the ability and motivation to carry on learning and to carry on adapting throughout our lives .

The second is to ensure that the workforce of the future to have a first-hand experience of cultural differences.

And the sooner this experience is made, the better. This is why we promote international exchanges and mobility of students and trainees.

The new lifelong learning programme of the European Union offers excellent opportunities to do all of this.

In particular, the programme is designed to help people develop transferable skills that they can adapt and use in changing situations.

And we need to make sure that everyone gets a realistic chance to acquire and update such skills at any point in their live.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

The rationale behind lifelong learning that I have just sketched for you is part of a larger process of change driven by the knowledge economy.

As you know well, this is the centrepiece of the EU strategy for the present decade. The Lisbon agenda-as it is called-states that the EU should aim to become the world's "most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy".

The Lisbon agenda pushed education and training among the top priorities of the EU because everyone agrees that they account for a big part of the competitivity of our societies and economies.

So, what is happening in Europe in the areas of education, research and innovation?

First, our economies are no longer manufacturing economies, they are becoming transformation and service economies. This implies that they should also become innovation economies.

Let's see what the figures tell us.

First, we need to invest more and better into research and development. Here the comparison must be with the United States , because we produce almost the same GDP.

The US accounts for 36.7% of the global expenditure. The EU25-we are still building indicators for Romania and Bulgaria -has a much lower share: 22.85%.

Second comes innovation . According to the latest innovation scoreboard compiled by the Commission, the countries that spend most on R&D in the world can be divided into four groups.

Japan and the US are among the global innovation leaders. Australia and the EU25 are in the group of next-best performers. As a matter of fact, Australia performs better than the EU25 average.

However, this average hides wide differences between European countries. Finland and Sweden are ahead of the States in the top group; in contrast, my native Slovakia is in the last group of countries, a whisker behind China , but ahead of Poland and India.

But the picture is not bleak if we look at the trends. There are clear signs of catching up in innovation performance. This means that lagging countries advance faster than the leaders.

The pattern applies among the best performers too. Australia is forging ahead while Japan and the US are losing momentum. The EU25 are also climbing the innovation ladder faster than Japan and the US, but the gaps are still significant.

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Against this background, all eyes focus on our universities and research centres . And the challenge is not only how to boost innovation.

Universities should reform to face other challenges such as wide social access, good regional links, and the ability to bring research outcomes and innovation to market.

Which reforms do European universities need most? I will mention two: governance and new curricula.

First, governance . Even in countries where universities are technically independent, it isn't always like that in reality. Where universities are almost totally publicly funded, ministries control what they do.

This is the first thing that has to change. That means that the funding regime has to change too, but this will happen only if universities can persuade society and governments that they are good value for money.

Second is curricular reform . Over the 8 years since the Bologna declaration was signed, more than 40 European countries have converted to the BA/MA/PhD structure.

They have moved from a variety of degrees-often dear to their own academic worlds-to a global standard for university qualifications.

As a result, European higher- education systems are becoming more comprehensible, and therefore more attractive world wide. That matters, since the flow of foreign students into universities is a major development factor.

However, reforming higher education and research centres may not be enough; we have to deal with business as well.

This is going to be a two-way process, because it's not just that universities fight shy of business; businesses fight shy of universities and research as well.

What to do?

First, and this is a solution that many universities and research centres would like, there is the usual answer: throw more money at the problem.

Give us more money, many universities say, and we will be able to solve the problem for you. But that's not enough. Doing more of the same will not bring about the change we need.

Second solution : promote excellence in research. This is very important. We need more excellence, and we need to treat research (in particular basic research) on a purely competitive basis, supporting the best wherever we find it.

We are all agreed that we have to do that in Europe and one solution we found is the establishment of the European Research Council . The ERC formally started to work a couple of months ago and has a total budget of 7.5 billion Euro over the next seven years.

The third solution we found is the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme , running from 2007 to 2013 with a budget of approximately 3.6 billion Euro.

This, too, is very important. It will support companies that innovate, particularly through ICT. It will support risk capital, eco-innovation and intelligent energy use.

All of these things are important. But none of them deals with our underlying problem. We cannot make the right connections between the research we do-which is often very good-and commercial opportunities.

We have a gap which we have been unable to bridge. None of these solutions attacks that side of the problem. That is where the European Institute of Technology -or EIT-comes in.

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I believe that if we are to improve competitiveness, we need a way of bringing together universities, research centres and business around the knowledge triangle: education, research and innovation.

The EIT is one way of promoting this.

The EIT should be an independent operator: it should do its own teaching, its own research-and in due course-it will develop a portfolio of innovation.

It will not be a new institution built in a green field to compete with existing ones. Instead, it will be a network organisation, taking in the best teams from universities, research centres and businesses.

The research areas would be identified by a Governing Board made up of eminent academics and business people, and they would try to select the areas for long-term investment, in which they and industry could invest the best human resources available.

To give you an idea of what I mean by research area, climate change would be a good candidate to submit to the attention of the board.

In due course, there would be industrially useable outcomes; but the time-scale should be long enough for these to be reached without the need to review participation too often and spend precious time and energy on renewing the finance.

Let me give you a couple of reasons why I like this project.

First, because the format is new . Building business into the management and operation of education and research is en exciting challenge. We need new models; we need something which can show that innovation is possible also in institutional design.

Second, the EIT will be governed only on the basis of excellence; so by definition it will not be subject to political or national interference.

I am not saying that the EIT will provide all the right answers or that it will be the magic formula for Europe 's innovation. But change is needed and we believe there should be a flagship to promote it.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I have spoken to you about the need to introduce lifelong learning into our educational and training systems; I have told you about the need to reform higher education and research; and I have told you about the EIT.

Well, I kept the best for last. All these analyses and proposed reforms are not worth a penny unless they are centred on the people.

The knowledge everyone is talking about is their knowledge, the spirit of entrepreneurship is their spirit, the ability and willingness to bring an idea to market are their skills.

This is my parting thought for you. Political and business leaders should never forget that education and industrial policies work best when they are designed around the human factor.

Thank you.

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