Mikel Navarro and Edurne Magro wonder in El País < a href="http://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2013/09/08/paisvasco/1378661018_949610.html">why is the RVCTI needed and they advocate that Vocational Training Schools (EFP) and SEIC companies (Knowledge-Intensive Business Services) must form part of the Basque Network for Science, Technology and Innovation (RVCTI).
First of all, I would like to congratulate the authors for analyzing a subject of such importance for our Country, of which they are recognized specialists and which is often not sufficiently attended to and treated in the media. Go ahead, I basically agree with the content of the article, although I would like to make some comments about it, always with the aim of generating a constructive debate:
First of all, my impression is that despite the fact that SEICs are not part of the RVCTI, they are already an important part of Basque science, technology and innovation policy. In fact, the SEICs play an essential role in many public programs to support innovation, both from the Basque Government and from the Provincial Councils and other Public Institutions: they can attend as beneficiaries of multiple programs, they can be approved in various methodologies to provide services to companies that have privileged treatment (Innovation Agendas, Check +Innova and others) and carry out advisory work for many Universities, Research Centers and companies in their R+D+I strategies and projects (both management and knowledge generation).
Secondly, and as seems logical from the above, I agree that the SEICs are a key agent in the innovation system and that they will continue to be so even more so in the future. In this sense, it is becoming more and more palpable that Basque politics will have to take them more and more into account and, surely, in a very different way from the current one in its initiatives. However, I do not agree that from this it can be inferred that they necessarily have to be part of the RVCTI. This is still a legal/formal instrument to certify some agents and make it easier for them to receive privileged structural financing -There are subsidy programs (Saiotek, Emaitek, Etortek fundamentally, but also others) that require you to be authorized by the RVCTI to being able to participate- and, in my opinion, including this type of company in the RVCTI would further complicate its own management, which cries out for simplicity and clarity and, from my point of view, a clear reduction in number of agents.
In particular, it would restrict membership of the RVCTI to agents whose basic function is the generation of technology and knowledge (Universities and their Departments and technological and research centers), better establishing the requirements and functions of each one, as well as the objective standards to be met to receive structural financing, as is already done with the EMAITEK program. On the other hand, I believe that it is absolutely necessary to articulate new instruments to facilitate and improve the management of the Basque innovation system as a whole, which is made up of a wide and diverse multiplicity of agents that goes far beyond the knowledge generation centers. As the authors rightly say: for the creation of spaces for interconnection, the identification of roles for the multiplicity of agents in the system and, especially, the creation of a common vision of science, technology and innovation in the Basque Country.
With respect to VTEs, it is clear that they have a huge panorama open as instruments to promote business innovation and that much more daring policies are needed than those that have been developed up to now with this type of agent. However, I do not believe that the route necessarily involves incorporating these agents into the RVCTI.