How can territories prepare for the Green and Digital transitions? New JRC Report on Projecting Opportunities for INdustrial Transition explains it all

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Recovering from the effects of the pandemic and future-proofing our economies and societies as foreseen in the European Green Deal require a degree of mass mobilisation that is unprecedented in modern times. How can a territory prepare in times of pervasive change? How can threats turn into opportunities? How can policy support industrial change that combines material prosperity, environmental sustainability and social cohesion? 

Adequate preparation hinges crucially on non-readily available evidence. A newly published JRC report documents the POINT (Projecting Opportunities for INdustrial Transitions) methodological framework to collect evidence about affected production and consumption systems and chart profitable pathways for their transformation. The report is a key output of the JRC Working Group on Understanding and Managing Industrial Transitions. Heeding the lessons of literatures on system innovation, new industrial policies and transformative innovation governance, the POINT framework argues for broadening the domain of innovation policy making beyond the quadruple-helix of knowledge producers, to cover the entire production and consumption system. When a broader view of the industrial system is taken, previously unidentified interconnections between its constituent parts can become obvious.

Importantly, these interconnections represent points of powerful policy leverage, if their identification enables coordinated and timely action. Successful transition management requires strategic directions that draw upon territorial values (in addition to economic strengths); a concern with multiple-value creation (economic, social, environmental); the management of demand (public procurement, households); understanding and managing resistance to change; and ways of satisfying the very different needs and ambitions of numerous actors with unequal power over the system. The report draws from experience gathered during the development of the pilot territorial reviews of industrial transition in Andalusia, Bulgaria, Greece and Romania, and offers guidance to analysts and policy makers interested in conducting similar studies in their territories. 

The reviews can make an important contribution to the successful preparation of each territory’s transition, helping them develop actions compatible with the corresponding ex ante fulfilment criterion of good governance (without prejudice to the final decision of the European Commission). Access the full text of the report HERE