The Digital Agenda is gaining political importance as well as a firm anchoring in the national ICT & enterprise policy. Despite the different accents, the priorities at EU, national and local level seem to go in the same strategic direction.

It's now time to go "really local", by strengthening the link with the regional and local authorities, and with the businesses and academic world, and by putting together all the existing projects and the interested stakeholders.
 
More awareness-raising might be needed in order to ensure a broad commitment, beyond "the usual suspects", and a bottom-up approach, both indispensable for a successful implementation. Concrete examples, discussed in relation to ICT and social challenges, showed that a lot of potential remains unused.

The main messages passed to the EU were:
 
• The need for an intensified competition on and between the ICT networks;

• A request for more clarity as regards state aid rules applied to next generation networks and for EU funding in support of broadband deployment in rural areas. This message will be taken onboard in the next revision of the State Aid Guidelines, due for the second half of 2012;

• The need for standards in the area of ICT and social challenges;

• The need for policy makers to focus on contents, as the same time as on infrastructure deployment. Two concrete requests were made: clarifying the copyright issues and supporting educational contents in "small" languages;

• As regards EU funds for research, the level of financing should be adjusted downwards (lower co-financing rates by the EU, higher stakes from beneficiaries), on the principle “what is free has no value”. Downstream activities are in fact not stimulated if research received 100% public funding. On the other hand, more flexibility was requested as regards the potential beneficiaries (SMEs should be able to participate) as well as the research focus;

• Facilitating knowledge exchange among European regions, on how to implement the Digital Agenda, but also stimulating competition among them, for example via the EU or the Member States creating a simplified Regional Scoreboard, following the example of the Digital Agenda Scoreboard.