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Welcome to TARGET Project

The aim of the TARGET project is to design and develop a structured and valorized set of guidelines & recommendations, cumulating into a toolkit, for a targeted R&D Policies with a focus on the life science sector. The purpose of the toolkit is to provide structured guidance and instructions as to how to create, enhance, improve and nurture such a targeted policy and to enable concrete policy making decisions. The toolkit is aimed at becoming a generic tool that can support targeting R&D policy activities, not only among the consortium’s partners, but throughout the rest of Europe.

The toolkit will address issues such as:

• the ability to define strategic priorities
• to evaluate technological gaps
• to identify the elements within the national/regional innovation system responsible of achieving the selected priorities (including the missing elements)
• to identify potential system failures, to formulate effective policies
• to reach coordination among the relevant policy makers/ministries.

A consortium consisting of 8 partners from 6 different countries is assembled to implement the project. The consortium brings together public bodies, and research institutes, whose research will provide a sound base for decision-making in science and policy. The TARGET project will stimulate a mutual learning process among the consortium partners for the identification of the proper mix between horizontal R&D policies and targeted ones.

The project will discuss the importance of targeting as an instrument for coping with global competition. The ability to design target R&D policies successfully is associated with the ability of policy makers to identify not only basic market failure, which result in the formulation of “simple” R&D support schemes, but also system failures which may block or impede the growth of the desired (“targeted”) business sector. System failures might be the result of improper IPR protection, competition rules, product regulations which slow down innovation, critical gaps in the financial systems supporting innovation (such as low level of available venture capital), lack of coordination between different policy actors, etc.

The TARGET approach follows the direction that was laid down by the European Union’s Scientific and Technical Research Committee (“CREST”) in the third Open Method of Coordination (“OMC”) cycle and aims at assisting countries to “focus their efforts when devising policies to improve overall R&D and innovation system performance“.