India, Sweden to collaborate in innovation sector

India and Sweden on Thursday agreed to bolster their cooperation in the field of innovation.

A Sweden-India Innovation Dialogue is to be established wherein the two countries will explore how to optimise the formal bilateral collaboration mechanisms, to increase synergies between policy areas and enable the exchange of innovation systems.

The dialogue would be supported and advised by an expert group and will consist of key innovation stakeholders from relevant line ministries and agencies to provide overall strategic direction for innovation policy development.

India and Sweden will explore on establishing of mechanism to facilitate mutual access to research and innovation infrastructure in both the countries. This also includes collaboration between testbeds and creation of open innovation arenas, new testbeds and living labs.

The two countries will jointly commit to co-funding for support of bilateral innovation projects. The two sides will launch challenge-based joint industrial research and development (R&D) and technological innovation projects to address challenges and opportunities identified by India and Sweden.

The projects will be funded on an 'n+n model' that combines funding from government and businesses. The joint funding will increase the impact and concrete deliverables of the innovation collaboration by investing in jointly developed projects, making full use of comparative strengths of our industries and innovation systems.

The implementation of the innovation partnership will be supported by a roadmap document which will be developed by the Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation in Sweden and the Ministry of Science and Technology in India (Department of Science and Technology and Department of Biotechnology)

The progress in the implementation of the partnership will be reported to the two ministries for review and assessment in 2020.