On site in Lyon - on the Europe Innova Conference - new possibilities for innovative companies and collaboration between industry and academia will come. Listening to Francoise le Ball from the European commission I understand that there will be new great opportunities for the companies in the Oresund region and also for the Academia creating new projects.
New clusters is not the issue for the commission at the moment, instead creating excellence among clusters is on the agenda. And this is great for our region. Within the Oresund Sceince Region we have worldclass clusters within not only ict but also logistic, environment, food and health. This is a fantastic base for taking our cluster as a plattform into new levels. Creating world class is all about combining the fantastic skills within the companies in the region with the great research that is going on in the universities. Actually I think that we one of the strongest grounds for creating excellence in Europe and I base this on three important factors:
We allready has a tradition of bringing research (especially product related) into commersialization. A thing that I clearly can see is a lack in other regions, who we talk to in the conference. If we continue to develop the skills we have in bringing research further on I'm sure that we can be in the lead further on. But of course this also means that decision makers in both the industry, academia and public sector is aware of how collaboration works and the important role cluster organizations fills as a gateway between research and industry.
In the region we also have a very wide range of universities with different focuses and themes. This is important, creating projects with cross competence is one of the key issues to find new services, new products and increase innovation. I'm fully convinced that we can be even better in combining different research fields and hearing the commissioners speech now convince me that we are on the right track using our strong cluster plattforms as the oil in the machinery for collaboration.
As a third important factor we have critical mass in the region. The ICT-sector as an example is one of the largest in Europe. With over 500 public researchers and 5000 within the industry we actually can create new innovations together with entrepreuneurs. With this large critical mass we have both the possibility to combine different research fields with each other, but also attract talent from other regions in the world. But, as a part of a large populated region, we also can use people in the region as innovator - userdriven innovation. The region is highly ranked in terms of mobile readiness and broadband penetration. This is a great advantage giving us possibilities to use the region also as a testbed for new products and services.
So will this happen, are we going into worldclass? Well, we need decision makers to understand that collaboration creating a larger region is a key issue and there must be some public involvment in that, but also a willingnes from for instance universities in the region to collaborate in real world. We also need to tell the rest of the world that there are some great possibilities in our region and that it is a great place to start r & d departments. A public investment in this would probably be one of the fastest ROI our local government have seen.