New Commission study identifies Europe's top ICT hubs
15 Apr 2014 12:35 PM
Wondering what makes an
ICT hotspot? Take a look at Munich, London, Paris or smaller cities such
as Darmstadt identified in a new EU Atlas of ICT hotspots. This atlas
shows where digital technologies thrive and examines the factors contributing
to this success.
Most of Europe's ICT
activity takes place in 34 regions across 12 countries (listed in the Annex).
Key ingredients to success included access to top Universities and research
centres and funding opportunities such as venture capital.
European Commission
Vice-President @NeelieKroesEU said: "This is proof that digital
success comes through a willingness to invest, an open mindset for innovation
and planning. Europe needs to build these values today to be a global leader in
technology."
Category
Rankings
Computer Science
graduates: the UK provides 8 out of the 10 top
regions
Research and Patenting activity:
Germany ranks first.
Employment
Growth: Lisboa in Portugal and Rzeszowski in Poland are growing
fastest
Venture
capital: Munich, Paris and London attract the most
capital.
You don't have to be big to
succeed!
The study also underlines the
importance of smaller regions. For example, Darmstadt -a city of 150.000
people– building on its research & innovative output and on its
active business community, ranks number seven at EU's top 10 ICT Poles of
excellence. Other small-sized regions showing strong performance are
Leuven, Karlsruhe or Cambridge.
Ingredients for digital
success
A region's ICT excellence is
linked to research and development activities, to the ability to take knowledge
to market (innovation) and to building an intense business activity around this
innovation. It seems that ICT thriving regions:
-
- are mostly long standing
industrial areas;
-
- have high-standard educational
institutions and other key innovation players;
-
- have long-term policies on
research and innovation;
-
- have enjoyed historical
opportunities (such as being the political national capitals);
-
- tend to cluster together (half
of the 34 Poles of excellence are neighbouring regions).
This effect is also observed in
places like the Silicon Valley (USA), Bangalore (India) or Changzhou
(China).
Background
This report addresses
the EU Strategy to reinforce Europe's
industrial and technology leadership in ICT. The report findings and the Atlas
will be used in future EU policy formulation on encouraging innovation in the
EU. They will also feed into EURIPIDIS project, which focuses on ICT
innovation policy and on transferring the best research ideas to the market.
Moreover, the JRC plans to analyse the technological diversity of ICT activity
and its evolution; this will help identify complementarities between
locations.
A European ICT Pole of
Excellence (EIPEs) is a geographical area inside the EU, with best performing
activities in ICT production, R&D and innovation, activities with a central
role in global international networks.
The report looked at all EU
regions (1303 NUTS3 regions) in terms of ICT activity and
assigned scores according to its relative weight; 14% of the regions scored
above 20 points. The top 34 scored between 41 and 100.
The report analysed three
elements (business activity, R&D and Innovation in the ICT sector) on the
basis of their intensity (e.g. business turnover, turnover growth, number of
employees), their internationalisation (e.g. how many international partners
businesses/research centres/universities have) and networking (what is the role
of each region in networks: which of them are hubs and connect directly to many
partners, which of them have links that only allow few
exchanges)
The findings relied on a
Composite Indicator bringing together 42 Indicators to evaluate ICT
activities.Several data sources and databases were used to elaborate the
indicators and measurements: University rankings, citation indexes, information
on European research projects' collaborations, how many global top R&D
investor companies in ICTs are present in each region, venture capital funding
or employment data and companies' turn over information.
The European ICT Poles of Excellence (EIPE) Project is being
developed by the Joint Research Centre and DG Connect.
Useful links
European ICT Poles of Excellence report
Hashtags: #research #innovation
Neelie Kroes website
Follow Neelie on Twitter
Contacts
Email: comm-kroes@ec.europa.eu Tel: +32.229.57361 Twitter: @RyanHeathEU
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