Science, Technology and Industry Co-operation in Finland - Technopolis: Best Practices for Science and Technology Cities - page 433

Academy of Finland, as well as from the EU under the Seventh Framework
Programme.
The other significant change is a public recommitment to local and regional
level economies and innovation systems—a move towards decentralisation. The
Centre of Expertise Programme (OSKE), which dates to 1994, was renewed in
2007 for a 6-year period in order to ''improve regional competitiveness in line with
national and European policies'' . The programme traditionally provided small
amounts of funding and high-level status in the Finnish innovation strategy to
encourage co-operation among universities, research institutes,
companies and municipal actors in 21 regional Centres of Expertise. The 2007
programme created 13 new Clusters of Expertise—or Competence Clusters—
selected through a competitive process to represent the top expertise in their fields,
which range from Food Development, Clean Tech, Energy Technology and Health
and Wellbeing to Ubiquitous Computing, Nanotechnology and Tourism and
Experience Management (Sabel and Saxenian 2008 ).
4 Co-operation in Innovation Activity
According to the study done by The Statistics Finland, the key co-operation
partners in innovation activity are customers and equipment and material suppliers
and for group enterprises the other enterprises from their own group. Around one-
third of those with innovation activity connected to product or process innovations
in 2006-2008 reported about co-operation with equipment and material suppliers.
Similarly, around one-third said they had had collaboration related to innovation
activity with customers. Forty percent of the innovating enterprises belonging to
groups had co-operated with enterprises in their own group. In all, 37 % of those
with innovation activity said they had co-operation related to innovations. Nearly
all of these enterprises had co-operation partners in Finland, around 70 % else-
where in Europe. Of those having co-operated, nearly one-third had partners in the
United States and close on one-fifth said they had partners in China. 6 % of those
having co-operated reported partners in India and one-fifth elsewhere not men-
tioned above. In relative terms, the least collaboration was reported with public
and private non-profit research institutes (Statistics Finland 2010 ).
European Commission makes regularly surveys on the development of Inno-
vation Environment in the member countries in Europe. Finland has been one of
the top performing countries. One method of comparison is the amount of Small
and Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs), which co-operate with universities, research
centres and other organisations in research and development. Chart below presents
the comparison between member countries in 2006.