Polish innovations in aerospace industry - opportunities and threats

European Union is facing great challenges in terms of formulating and developing its innovation policy. Polish case is very peculiar – on one hand Poland has been struggling to boost its innovativeness by introducing new instruments and focusing on particularly promising areas, on the other – for many years has been occupying the lowest positions in both global and European innovation rankings.

There are many factors identified as barriers to fostering innovation in Poland. One of them is weakening cooperation between industry and research institutions. Despite of numerous programs launched by Polish authorities and many financial incentives offered, the share of innovative industrial companies introducing innovations to the market is much lower than the EU average.

In general, Academia-Industry interactions are hardly to achieve in Poland because
of the following reasons:
- ownership and decision taking in big aerospace companies has been transferred out of Poland,
- consolidation and ‘hermetization’ in big industrial companies is progressing,
- the meaning of scientometric indicators focused on purely basic research in evaluation process of technical universities and research institutes is being overrated.

The following actions could be considered to improve the Academia-Industry interactions:
- launching programs to foster the creation of spin-off companies, especially around strong public research centers,
- introducing good procedures to make the process of research results’ commercialization more effective,
- starting public programs for SMEs involved in research results’ commercialization process (eg. special credit line programs),
- stimulating of entire technical readiness level chain process via Academia-SMEs-Industry interactions.

The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to describe the Polish aerospace industry potential. Secondly, to present first stage of research on the impact of the latest steps taken by the government on the capacity of Poland’s and EU’s R&D system.