‘Adopt, Adapt, Advance: Innovating for the Future’ is the title of a panel discussion at this year’s EBRD Annual Meeting in Tbilisi, Georgia, looking at the key role innovation can play in driving forward reforms and supporting long-term economic growth.
The panel will build on the findings of the EBRD’s 2014 Transition Report Innovation in Transition that explored how innovation by individual companies can help find new growth drivers and re-energise transition in the EBRD region.
The 2014 Report was in many ways an answer to question posed in the previous year’s Transition Report as to why transition had ground to a halt and what could be done to kick start reforms again.
After a spurt of important steps to transform the transition economies, reform fatigue had set in. Reforms were slowing down, stopping or even being thrown into reverse.
The 2014 report looked at the obstacles to innovation but also how it could be facilitated by proactive steps on the part of authorities and the companies themselves.
It served as a guide to how the EBRD’s own activities could support innovation and as part of its own response, the EBRD adopted a knowledge economy initiative, designed to promote innovation across EBRD projects in a more systematic way.
The Innovating for the Future panel in Tbilisi will bring together business leaders, academics and thought-leaders to explore ways to assist companies to better absorb foreign technologies and improve management techniques, showing that new processes can be just as effective as new products in increasing productivity.
The panel will discuss how governments, the private sector and the EBRD can work together to unleash this potential: by providing SMEs and corporate clients with both advice and capital - brains and (financial) brawn.
Friday 15 May 2015
11.30 – 13.00, Room B, Parliament Building
Moderator:
- Ralph de Haas, Director of Research, EBRD
Speakers:
- Hakan Aygen, Executive Vice President, Corporate Finance and Economic Research, TSKB
- Albert Bravo-Biosca, Senior Economist, Nesta
- George Chirakadze, President, UGT; Head of Supervisory Boards, President, Business Association of Georgia
- Beata Javorcik, Professor of Economics, Oxford University
The experts will be looking specifically at some key questions, including:
- How can policy makers and authorities help firms as they seek to boost productivity via innovation?
- How does innovation in an emerging nation differ from innovation in the most advanced countries?
- What obstacle do private sector firms face when they try to innovate?
- What role can the EBRD play in helping to forge constructive cooperation between the private and the public sectors?
