BIOETYKA / WPROWADZENIE

BIOETYKA / WPROWADZENIE - Przeglądy aktów prawnych

European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing – Komisja Europejska 2014

With the Innovation Union strategy the European Commission aims to enhance European competitiveness and tackle societal challenges through research and innovation.

One way in which this is to be achieved is with Innovation Partnerships. Their unique strength is that they will address weaknesses in the European research and innovation system (notably, under-investment, 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 major 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 European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing will pursue a triple win for Europe:

1. enabling EU citizens to lead healthy, active and independent lives while ageing;

2. improving the sustainability and efficiency of social and health care systems;

3. 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 will be realised in the three areas of prevention and health promotion, care and cure, and active and independent living of elderly people. The overarching target of this partnership will be to increase the average healthy lifespan by two years by 2020.

The Partnership aims to achieve this by bringing together key stakeholders (end users, public authorities, industry); all actors in the innovation cycle, from research to adoption (adaptation), along with those engaged in standardisation and regulation. The partnership provides these actors with a forum in which they can cooperate, united around a common vision that values older people and their contribution to society, identify and overcome potential innovations barriers and mobilise instruments.

The Partnership aims at improving the framework conditions for uptake of innovation, leveraging 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.