Opening speech of the Executive Vice-President Teresa Ribera at the event "Territories in Action: a sneak peek into transformative innovation"

It is a pleasure to welcome you all to the Berlaymont and to be here with my very good friend and colleague Jessica Roswell.

Someone as committed as you all to innovation, to high quality of life, to teamwork to identify how we can do better every single day to improve the quality of life of everybody.

And of course, this means that we still need to unlock the huge potential that it exists in every single territory.

We need brave people, brave members of institutions, brave researchers, brave and committed citizens that identify how to connect the dots to use the strengths, the potentiality, the cultural heritage, the knowledge, the differentiated added value of each of the territories to do better.

So, thinking about place-based transformation is a great idea. It is why the preparatory action on innovation for place-based transformation matters, and I welcome and commend the work of the Joint Research Centre, Bernard and the whole team. Your involvement has been absolutely key.

Today around 200 territories across Europe are already participating. 200 sources of potential. 200 territories having new ideas and betting and investing in their people.

Territories that may be experimenting with cleaner energy on circularity, food security, and digital public services.

Territories that are helping the new European Bauhaus to take place. When it can seem abstract at first, it ends up providing, supplying, coming up with solutions.

They are not doing this alone. They are doing this together. We are doing this together. It could be very difficult to do things alone.

But the energy at the very single scale, at the very single layer, does help to join forces and transform through creativity, the realities, the problems that we may be facing.

Different territories that have different strengths, different industrial traditions, different cultural heritages, natural resources, and human entrepreneurial talent.

And our challenge is not to make every single territory to look the same. Our challenge is to ensure that everyone does its best to build on what it already is, on what it already has.

This is also how we strengthen Europe's resilience and competitiveness, variety, and diversity.

We enhance the protection of the resources that we count on. But this requires the right framework. Innovation does not flourish in a vacuum.

We need investment. We need the skills. We need infrastructures. And yes, we need the right context, including the right conditions, to ensure that it happens.

Regulation may create predictability, may facilitate the proper reading of the different signals to build the direction of trouble. It helps when it is properly designed.

It helps when it takes into consideration the different challenges ahead either if they are technological or physical things that change at a very fast speed, and this is why the support and the involvement of the joint research centers is so key.

Your ambition to further develop collaborative approaches for regulatory experimentation and learning is helping in this exercise.

We need spaces where territories, business researchers, startups, regulators, citizens can work together, experiment new ideas, testing what they mean in practice and where failure can also be part of the learning process.

It is very difficult to achieve everything at the very same first time. We learn from failure. We need to do things so to prevent to the extent possible failure, but we need to learn when it happens and to improve in the next phase.

The initiative we are discussing today is therefore much more than a collection of projects. It is an opportunity to learn together how we can do better. How innovation is about people, places, there is no single path to success. There may be many different views, many different paces to succeed.

It helps to build trust and confidence. The two conditions that we require to ensure that innovation and transformation can happen turning back into people. It is not only technology. It is experimentation. It is stress. It is confidence. It's doing together. It's creativity.

The results to be presented today confirm that our territories burst with ideas, that these ideas can be turned into local successes, and that local successes can be turned into European strengths.

So, congratulations, my most sincere gratitude to you all and let's keep on doing. Let's keep on working together.

Thanks a lot.

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