Sustainable Innovation across Key Sectors and Societal Challenge 5: Insights from and for Bulgaria

The European Union (EU) targets growth based on smart, sustainable and inclusive economies, which can be promoted through profound changes in the European economic sectors largely spurred by the increasing importance and penetration of ICT throughout the European societies. Opportunities for industrial sectors to renew themselves are largely provided by sustainable innovations. This policy brief looks at the sectoral relevance of the SI initiatives collected in the CASIPEDIA against the challenges of climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials. The policy brief discusses how key policy developments at the national level are related to SI and connects the sectoral analysis on SC5 with policy developments at the national level. The recently adopted Innovation Strategy for Smart Specialization of Bulgaria sets the vision of Bulgaria as a country that makes a qualitative leap in its innovation performance at EU level by 2020 and successfully tackles public challenges in the field of demography (reverse brain drain and youth entrepreneurship), sustainable development, intellectual capital and the nation’s health. The strategic goal of the document aims at moving Bulgaria from the group of ’modest innovators’ into the group of ’moderate innovators’ by 2020. The Strategy provides measures to achieve these goals based on the understanding that the industry’s competitive advantage could be achieved by developing, implementing and disseminating innovation, providing leading competitive position in the international markets, meeting in advance new needs of national and international consumers.