Growth, jobs and more

The "Lisbon Strategy" alias "the strategy for growth and jobs" is resulting in growth, does create jobs, but is not something that the Europeans would care about. I tried to run "lisbon strategy" through Google Trends and the result was: Your terms - "lisbon strategy" - do not have enough search volume to show graphs. Translation: nobody cares. Very few people know that the strategy sets targets such as investing 3% of GDP in R&D, that it calls for 70% employment, for 25% reduction in administrative burden or 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. The strategy will be updated in spring 2008 under the Slovenian presidency. The discussions about the update started earlier this year. Portugal (as the current presidency) and Slovenia (as the next) established good cooperation. On Tuesday the Commission published its view on the past and future of the Strategy that is taking many of those discussions into account. As a very early adopte...

One of the themes somehow neglected in the Lisbon strategy to date has been creativity . Indeed there has been much discussion about knowledge, r&d and innovation, but creativity is more than this. At some point I'd like to write a longer post about this, however, for now just let me share some slides. The deck shared is a basis for three presentations I did lately, one last week at the Future of Europe Summit in Andorra , one today for Heads of delegations of the Commission to member states and one at the Pre-presidency conference, both in Ljubljana. The slides also include a discussion on the priority areas of the updated Lisbon Strategy, a view on its structure etc.