“The Baltic states are particularly innovation friendly because their economic and societal development as well as national security and resilience heavily depends on digital transformation,” said Erika Kuročkina, Lithuania’s vice minister of Economy and Innovation, which is a founding partner in the Innovation Club.
“Our expertise in the digital transformation of the public sector might be of a particular importance for Germany, where sometimes experimenting with offerings of new technological developments in their public sector might be complicated,” Kuročkina said.
From the Baltic states’ point of view, teaming up with Germany, which has one of the largest ICT markets in the world, gives them an amplified voice to shape the EU’s digital policies.
Future proofing
The Innovation Club is proposing nine areas to ensure the EU has a future-proof digital agenda, including a less burdensome digital environment for companies and consumers, actively involving SMEs and start-ups when developing digital services and harmonising access to data generated by the EU.
From the club’s perspective, the EU’s vision of a digital single market is laudable but there needs to be more pragmatic and efficient approaches to reaching this level of interoperability than are currently in place.
The EU launched the second iteration of its 10-year digital agenda in 2020. This includes objectives such as having 75% of companies using advanced technologies, more than 90% of SMEs reaching a basic level of digital intensity and doubling the number of EU start-up companies with a valuation of over $1 billion.
As part of this strategy, the Digital Services Act was brought in in 2022 as a way of better regulating online platforms operating in the EU. But it has hit the regular issue facing EU legislation, of implementation being in the hands of the member states.
“One of the main challenges that we see with the development of the digital single market is the fragmented regulation among the member states,” Kuročkina said. “The European Commission needs to actively monitor and coordinate how countries are going to put the Digital Services Act into their national law.”
A 2022 report by the European Investment Bank (EIB) highlighted the disparities in digital progress across different EU regions. Overall, the EU has been catching up to the US in adopting advanced digital technologies over the past four years, the EIB found. In 2022, 69% of EU companies used tools such as advanced robotics, big data analytics or AI, compared to 71% in the US. But the same time, 14% of EU companies said limited access to digital infrastructure is a major obstacle to investment.
One of the goals of the Innovation Club is to give extra impetus to the EU to continue to improve its digital environment. “It is important that we find common solutions at EU level to remain competitive worldwide and enhance the EU’s status as a strong technology hub,” Druckenthaner said.
Kuročkina said the diversity that is usually a barrier to harmonisation could be a strength in this case. “Differences force us to become more open-minded and make us transform or change, which is extremely important when we talk about innovation or IT – the things that are mainly about the change of our mind-set and the development of new skills.”
The Innovation Club intends to build on its paper for the new Commission by bringing in additional experts, with the view of submitting proposals for the next digital agenda.
The club also wants to expand to other countries. “Our expectation for the Innovation Club would be to make it like a platform and a community of practice where participating EU member states could have a possibility to discuss their digital transformation and innovation development challenges, exchange the ideas and come up with the proposals and questions for the EU digital agenda,” Kuročkina said.
Source link : https://sciencebusiness.net/news/ict/latvia-lithuania-estonia-and-germany-join-forces-improve-digital-services-across-eu
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Publish date : 2024-01-10 08:00:00
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