Structural Funds' support for innovation – Implementation challenges for 2007-2013 and beyond

This study aims at addressing three issues, i.e. the extent of Structural Funds support for innovation, the main limitations to an effective implementation of Structural Funds support for innovation and possible ways to overcome these limitations. The main conclusions are the following: - further efforts are required with ensuring complementarity between different instruments for innovation support, - the effectiveness of Structural Funds support for innovation in 2000-2006 has been limited by regulatory obstacles, design deficiencies and capacity constraints. The steep increase in innovation allocations for the 2007-2013 programming period points to the urgency of addressing these problems. A set of recommendations intends to make a contribution to improving the effectiveness of Structural Funds support for innovation.