Markku Markkula's Key messages as Concluding Remarks

Markku Markkula gives his key basic statements, summed up from the webinar contributions by Commissioner Elisa Ferreira, CoR President Apostolos Tzitzikostas, Member of the Cabinet Carlos Ferreira De Morais Pires, the JRC experts, and several members of the CoR, and my experiences:

1. Recovery resilience and renewal are integrated. This relies on the shoulders of decision-makers in cities and regions and is targeted to local business and service life by innovative measures focusing on the systemic transformation of societies.

2. Innovation and cohesion are firmly tight together, place-based ecosystems and European partnerships having a crucial role.

3. In the regional cohesion policy, the focus needs to be on implementing the ERA Hubs concept regionally to creating favourable conditions for a more profound and knowledge-intensive societal transformation – this means accelerating positive change and recovery in all parts of Europe.

4. The JRC, together with the CoR, should have the instrumental facilitator role in creating the frame for organising small workshops (using the Innovation Camp methodology and experiences) focusing on local renewal and delivering lessons learned in European virtual debates. This should be developed to become a Science Meets Regions movement in Europe.

5. From now on, RIS takes a new step as the European policy instrument and becomes RIS4 having sustainability as the fourth S. Smart Specialisation Strategy – in the form of RIS4 – is the instrument integrating the EU policies and financing at the real-life action level, see the attached drawing by Thomas Wobben (presented on 15 April, 2021 in the JRC Webinar).

Some key aspects about the Smart Specialisation?

RIS3 has been developed as a structural reform to upgrade the region's entire business environment and innovation ecosystem. Our CoR experiences coming from many regions strongly support the following Smart Specialisation Platform statements: RIS3 is an economic transformation agenda. RIS3 is a dynamic and evolutionary process (not a structure) deeply grounded in an entrepreneurial discovery process (not a one-off action) where governments are instead facilitators than in a position of command and control. RIS3 is for all, for innovation leaders, and those lagging behind.

As many phenomena of the digital society have already demonstrated, significant transformation takes place from the bottom up, and a pervasive mindset of "entrepreneurial discovery" is critical. Discovery also means more than innovation. It is rather a new activity – exploring, experimenting, and learning what should be done in the relevant industry or subsystem in terms of research, development, and innovation to improve its situation.  The CoR encourages all parties concerned to actively engage in science-society dialogues that explore and underscore how to translate research results into real-life practice.

What are the basic requirements for the transformation?

The Committee of the Regions welcomes this concept of ERA hubs: "The European Research Area needs to have the objective of ensuring, alongside excellence, the availability in all EU cities and regions of high-quality science that can be harnessed to boost innovation and help society and businesses meet the challenges of the Sustainable Development Goals and deal with today's crises. ERA hubs are an ideal instrument for fully recognising the merits of a place-based approach to science and innovation. This approach is all the more necessary in the context of the current crises, their impact on the most fragile and hardest-hit regions, and the fragmentation of the ERA."

THIS MEANS A MENTAL IMPROVEMENT to encourage bottom-up city development. The city here means the city – with all its citizens, industry, schools and universities, and all different kinds of communities – as the driver for sustainable growth and systemic transformation. All the sustainability dimensions need to be integrated: economic, ecologic, social, and above all, cultural. Historically social dimension has included culture. That, however, needs to be brought to the front.

To make this transformation happen, everything should be based on an increasing commitment to culture and learning, meaning above all personal mastery, mental models, team learning, shared vision, and systems thinking (source Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline 1990). This requires a shared commitment to focus on increasing intellectual capital and to use this in the form of knowledge-intensive and evidence-based decision-making on all governance levels.

The New Bauhaus initiative can have an essential role in creating the forerunner ecosystem mentality for human-centric green and digital transformation. From the urban environment perspective, the conditions for the ecosystem are created by several specific buildings and physical spaces, each having its unique role in forming the platform for all the strategic targets.

The most impressive forms of 'inventing the unique future' happen on new innovation-focused ecosystems. Typically, these are co-created spaces forming small village-type islands within the university and other similar campuses. These are dominated by creative and innovative mindsets and openness for new learning through experimenting, demonstrating, rapid prototyping, sharing, and scaling up. Living Labs, Future Centers, Innovation Camps, and events like Slush and Hackathons have been forerunners on this movement.