The question of how to better exploit the intellectual potential of Europe, through completing the European Research Area (ERA) by 2014, is being debated in a ministerial conference and an informal meeting of the EU Competitiveness Council, taking place in Sopot, Poland, this week.
This is the first ministerial conference to discuss strategic requirements for the realisation of ERA, the EU’s single market for knowledge. The vision is that ideas and those responsible for generating them circulate freely without legislative or economic barriers. The ERA therefore needs to remove obstacles to researcher mobility and to cross-border co-operation.
The completion of ERA is a formal objective of the Lisbon Treaty, and in February 2011 the European Council endorsed the Commission’s plan, as set out in the Innovation Union strategy, that ERA should be completed by 2014.
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