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innovation and the knowledge economy, including through the creation and strengthening of efficient regional innovation economies, systemic relations between the private and public sectors, universities and technology centres which take into account local needs, and in particular: enhancing regional R&TD and innovation capacities directly linked to regional economic development objectives by supporting industry or technology-specific competence centres, promoting industrial R&TD, SMEs and technology transfer, developing technology forecasting and international benchmarking of policies to promote innovation and supporting inter-firm collaboration and joint R&TD and innovation policies; stimulating innovation and entrepreneurship in all sectors of the regional and local economy by supporting the introduction of new or improved products, processes and services onto the market by SMEs, supporting business networks and clusters, improving access to finance by SMEs, promoting cooperation networks between enterprises and appropriate tertiary education and research institutions, facilitating SMEs' access to business support services and supporting the integration of cleaner and innovative technologies in SMEs; promoting entrepreneurship, in particular by facilitating the economic exploitation of new ideas and fostering the creation of new firms by appropriate tertiary education and research institutions and existing firms; creating financial engineering instruments and incubation facilities that are conducive to the research and technological development capacity of SMEs and to encouraging entrepreneurship and the formation of new businesses, especially knowledge-intensive SMEs;

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-11-02 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.