In five years of new industrial policy, using the most advanced instruments of public management, industrial capacities can be strengthened, the region's international competitiveness improved and even the embryonic development of a technological pole of world reference can begin: the Civil UAVs Initiative is the best example of this.
On May 29, 2020, we commemorated the fifth anniversary of the launch of the first call to the market to receive expressions of interest from companies in the aerospace sector that would like to develop the full potential of UAVs to improve public services in Galicia. Thus was born the Civil UAVs Initiative.
In five years, the implementation of the Galician aerospace policy has produced remarkable results:
- The attraction of more than 200 companies, regional, national and international, highly interested in investing in the aerospace sector in Galicia.
- The signing of agreements with 58 companies, ranging from large global multinationals to 12 newly created technology-based companies
- The realization of more than 60 joint projects, ranging from the first TRLs of various technologies to the commercialization of new products, solutions and technologies of high industrial value.
- The construction and equipping of the Rozas airfield, a reference infrastructure in Europe that aims to become a unique scientific and technical infrastructure for the aerospace industry.
- The construction of the industrial and technological park in Rozas, the only park of these characteristics located within an airfield for testing unmanned vehicles.
- Or the construction and entry into operation of a Joint Research Centre, with the National Institute of Aerospace Technology: the CIAR, also located in Rozas.
The effects and impacts of the Initiative are measured monthly, since its launch, with an innovative stakeholder reporting system that puts the value of stakeholder data into public policy:
- More than 800 direct jobs created, all of them high-tech jobs.
- More than 400 products and solutions created.
- 164 million investment mobilized and located in the territorial development area.
None of this has been random, but based on different theoretical approaches and the effort of a large team of experts from the Xunta de Galicia and Novadays, who devote their day to day to this Strategic Initiative.
The Strategic Initiatives are actions for programming instruments that go beyond the creation of action programmes. A Strategic Initiative is characterised by aligning multiple actors around a specific sectoral or functional objective and mobilising the resources and instruments of all of them to achieve that objective. Its design is contextual, depending entirely on the place, time and objectives pursued. In the case of the Civil UAVs Initiative, it is a Strategic Initiative promoted by the Xunta de Galicia, but in which very diverse actors of the Regional Government and the Spanish Government participate, giving importance to its open nature.
New industrial policies allow public managers to innovate and multiply the results, effects and impacts of their interventions.
There is no policy without instruments or policy tools, Without them, policies remain mere declarations of intent or, at best, plans with ambitious objectives that will never be achieved. Policy is doing and can only be done with the necessary help to design and implement innovative instruments that allow us to move from theory to action.
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