Innovation Policy In The European Union: Instruments And Objectives

The paper is organized as follows. In section 1, the authors present a brief survey of the documents through which European institutions, in particular the Council and the Commission, describe the principles to which they refer in order to guide their choices concerning community innovation policy. In section 2, they discuss the main interventions that have been carried out in the last ten years, through the financial instruments that Community institutions have at their disposal. In section 3 they present some remarks on the connection between the views of the innovation process that is held by the Commission, as it emerges from public documents, the theoretical assumptions that they think underlie it, and the interventions that Community institutions perform in practice.