A Q&A with innovation and technology policy expert Hugo Hollanders Few are better suited to discuss innovation policy at the pan-European level than Hugo Hollanders, Senior Researcher at UNU-MERIT and acting unit head of its Economics of Innovation and Technology Unit. For almost 25 years, Hollanders has been working with the European Commission (EC) on projects and reports as well as serving generally as a go-to expert on technology and innovation developments across the European Uni...

  The European Commission has released the European Innovation Scoreboard 2022, which tracks innovation across the continent. It was prepared and coordinated by UNU-MERIT’s researchers Hugo Hollanders, Nordine Es-Sadki and Aishe Khalilova.  The European Innovation Scoreboard provides a comparative analysis of innovation performance in EU countries, other European countries and regional neighbours. It assesses relative strengths and weaknesses of national innovation systems and helps countri...

A new report based on a Horizon 2020 monitoring exercise, featuring contributions from UNU-MERIT’s Ad Notten, confirms the continued progress of EU Open Science. With a steady increase over the years and an average success rate of 83% open access to scientific publications, the European Commission is at the forefront of research and innovation funders, concluded the consortium formed by the analysis company PPMI (Lithuania), research and innovation centre Athena (Greece) and Maastricht Uni...

Dr Katie Kuschminder has won a ‘Starting Grant’ from the European Research Council. Designed for postdocs with between two and seven years’ experience, the 1.5 million euro grant will enable Katie to form her own research team, which will focus on reintegration governance for migrants. Katie summed up her ‘Reintegrate’ project as follows: “Increasing numbers of people are returning to their origin countries after they migrate. This can be voluntary return or a...

Like so many other researchers sitting at home, watching the news about COVID-19, I have been impressed at how virologists, epidemiologists and other medical experts have caught the ears of national policymakers, business leaders and the general public. Suddenly, scientific facts and evidence bask in the trust of public opinion and fake news is once again ‘fake’ in the real sense of the word: unreliable, not to be trusted by anyone. Something climate experts have been dreaming of for decades, no...

On 26 March 2020, an utterly divided EU emerged from the European Council dedicated to European measures aimed at managing the severest crisis since 1929, one far worse  than the 2012-2017 crisis. The coronavirus pandemic and the transpiring economic and social crises present Europe with an extraordinary opportunity: to decide to move towards a deeper unity, or to decline irrevocably. The prevailing road will naturally depend on the decisions of the governments in the European Council and other ...

The European Observatory for Clusters and Industrial Change has published the 2020 edition of the European Panorama of Clusters and Industrial Change, written by UNU-MERIT researchers Hugo Hollanders and Iris Merkelbach. The report presents an overview of how clusters contribute to the competitiveness of the European economy. It analyses cluster strength across 51 exporting industry sectors in Europe and identifies 2,950 regional industrial clusters. These industrial clusters account for almost ...

BIGPROD’s official kick-off meeting took place at the Maastricht University Brussels Campus on 22 January 2020. The goal of the BIGPROD project is to extend existing econometric approaches to productivity, such as the Crepon-Duguet-Mairesse (CDM) model, with theoretically sound ‘Big data’ measures that are operationalised, validated through pilots and communicated to relevant stakeholders. This is achieved by uncovering the origins of the productivity slowdown in most Western economies. Ba...

"The vast network of scholars that the CatChain project brings is truly a great opportunity for anyone who participates in it, as it embraces a new economic thinking through the sharing of different experiences among the partner institutions and with other external parties." Dr. VGR Chandran Govindaraju, University of Malaya, Malaysia...

There is very little evidence that development aid and interventions affect migration decisions. The evidence we do have is mixed and often shows the opposite of the intended consequence. What does this mean for policymakers?...