On May, 17 2017, in Sofia Tech Park, Comac Medical Ltd., represented by Monika Panayotova, participated in a public consultation of 4 independent experts from Austria, Belgium, Netherlands and Finland, who are part of the Horizon 2020 Policy Support Facility (PSF) with representatives of the Ministry of Education and Science, Ministry of Economy, business and academic circles.
In order to support countries in reforming their research and innovation systems, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation initiated the Policy Support Facility – PSF. In this regards PSF is focused on “improving the development, implementation and evaluation of research and innovation policies”. An important part of its implementation is related to the carrying out of consultations with representatives of universities, scientific organizations, business and non-governmental organizations where they share their opinion and experience regarding the applied policies in Bulgaria in the field of scientific researches.
Comac Medical was invited as a beneficiary of the Horizon 2020’s SME Instrument and due to its Seal of Excellence, delivered by the European commission to its Phase II Project Proposal “Improving diagnostics of respiratory diseases and boosting the COMAC MEDICAL competitiveness and growth by validation of single breath fractional EBT biomarker through new method and device”.
The company was also presented as an award-winner in 2016 of the “Pythagoras” prize of the Ministry of Education and Science in the category for companies with the largest investments in scientific research. Basing on the successful combination of strategic vision for the future and a properly targeted funding, the cost of investment in scientific research and experimental development activities of Comac Medical represents 74% of its net revenues from sales in 2015, while in 2016 it raised to 80%. Moreover, the number of employees engaged in scientific research and development activities is over 66% of the total number of employees of the company.
During the public consultation, participants from the innovative ecosystem in Bulgaria shared the common statement about the need of practical implementation of the research and its effectiveness as well as of a balance between the industry-relevant innovations and the scientific excellence.
They emphasized on the importance of impact of the scientific researches on the economy and society. In this regard they focused respectively on the need to be generated further key performance indicators (KPIs) related to the implementation in terms of effectiveness, outputs, results and specific impact.
As a result of the in-depth discussions with various experts during their visit to Bulgaria and based on the received and analyzed related documents, the delegation of experts – Prof. Luc Soete, Ms. Bea Mahieu, Terttu Luukkonen, Wolgang Polt – will prepare recommendations which will be presented to the Bulgarian stakeholders in autumn 2017 and will be included into the Specific Support report, expected by November 2017. The report will include specific recommendations on how to meet the two objectives related to the development of: 1) a research performance-based funding system, inspired by Member States best practices; 2) a model for the evaluation and assessment of the public research institutions’ performances.
The report and the recommendations will be presented to the Bulgarian R&I community before the end of 2017.
