Sociedade, Tecnologia e Inovação Empresarial - Presidente da ...

structural policies towards education and training and knowledgeaccumulation and diffusion more broadly.This in turn raised in the 90’s two seemingly separate issues: whatare the skills needed for such new competitiveness and how to employthe unskilled. On the first question the experience has highlighted thefacts that the skills required combine formal education, a well-functioningand more socially distributed science and technology system,and of course on the job training with out of work personal experiences.This last factor gained in importance something which can beexpected in a transition period but also points to the need to restructurethe process of training and education along lines of life long trainingschemes, which alternate work experience and diversified trainingprograms. It also calls for a more open, mobile science and technologysystem. These «old» recipes have so far rarely been put into practice,the new context is undoubtedly now more favourable to theirimplementation. European policies can help in launching internationalschemes in human capital formation, human capital mobility and alsoin setting norms and models of reference, all of which appear necessaryand very useful. The balance is here clearly in the direction ofreducing the costs of non-Europe. But a very large part of the effortremains with the individual member countries. A primary condition forthe success of these national policies lies in their link with the structuralpolicies implemented in the other areas and especially in thereform of the national systems of innovation and the welfare systemswith the reorganisation of the nexus of community, social and personalservices that it implies.Employment in these latter services is clearly making the differencein levels of participation rate, and whether countries are achieving fullemployment or not. This is even more the case after the restructuringof manufacturing industries when employment in manufacturing tendedto reduce its demand for unskilled labour. The magnitude of employmentin these services is particularly large, either when there is a fullyfledge public provision as in the Scandinavian countries or when thelabour markets are so «flexible» with no minimum wage and an increasingnumber of working poor, leading to the provision of a wide rangeLuc Soete3 0 7Europe and national technology policies…