ACTIVITIES :: e-Inclusion :: Pilot European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing::

Pilot European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing

The partnership has now a dedicated website:
ec.europa.eu/active-healthy-ageing.

With the Innovation Union strategy, the European Commission aims to enhance European competitiveness while tackling societal challenges

One way in which this is to be achieved is with Innovation Partnerships. Their unique strength is that they will address the weaknesses in the European research and innovation system, as described in Innovation Union (notably, under-investment, framework conditions which are not sufficiently innovation-friendly, and fragmentation and duplication), which considerably complicate the discovery or exploitation of knowledge and, in many cases, ultimately prevent the entry of innovations into the market place.

The European Commission has identified active and healthy ageing as a societal challenge common to all European countries, and an area which presents considerable potential for Europe to lead the world in providing innovative responses to this challenge.

The pilot European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing will pursue a triple win for Europe:

enabling EU citizens to lead healthy, active and independent lives while ageing;
improving the sustainability and efficiency of social and health care systems;
boosting and improving the competitiveness of the markets for innovative products and services, responding to the ageing challenge at both EU and global level, thus creating new opportunities for businesses.

This should be realised in the three policy areas of prevention & health promotion, integrated care, and independent living of elderly people. The overarching target of this pilot partnership will be to increase the average healthy lifespan in the European Union by two years by 2020.

The pilot Partnership will aim to achieve this by bringing together key stakeholders from the demand and supply side; all actors in the innovation cycle, from research to translation (adaptation), deployment and final users, along with those engaged in standardisation and regulation. The pilot partnership provides these actors with a forum in which they can, united around the common goal, identify and overcome potential innovations barriers.

The pilot Partnership will aim at improving the framework conditions for uptake of innovation, as well will seek to leverage financing and investments in innovation and improve coordination and coherence between funding for research and innovation at European, national and regional level in Europe. This altogether will foster innovation in products, processes and services, and in parallel facilitate the innovation chain and reduce the time to market for innovative solutions. Ultimately this will produce benefits for innovation's final users – the older people and care providers.

Last update: 04/06/2012