KIC model should influence policy, conference told

Partnerships under the European Institute of Innovation and Technology should produce work that has an impact on policy, a conference on their progress has heard.

The EIT’s Knowledge and Innovation Communities, a set of partnerships involving universities, businesses and public organisations, should create new ways of working and spread the model into policy, participants at the EIT’s Innoveit conference, held in Budapest on 5-7 May, were told.

“The EIT as an institution, and certainly the European Commission, would have failed if we don’t manage to spread the model of the KICs and the EIT into policy,” said Xavier Pratts Monné, director-general of the Commission’s directorate for education and culture, under which the EIT operates. “This is the most convincing proposition of why KICs and the EIT have to exist.”