• The IV PRICIT (the Fourth Regional Scientific Research and Technological Innovation Plan) of the Community of Madrid represents the enormous effort made by our society in promoting good practices and creativity in science, research and technology.
• The Regional Plan aims at boosting the quality of the R&D Regional System in order to turn scientific research and technological innovation into a key factor of regional growth, supporting the region’s well-being and competitiveness.
• Now more than ever, science, technology and society are inseparable, because we are immersed in what today is known as the “knowledge society” in view of the important role that knowledge plays as a source of development and well-being. The lack of scientific knowledge keeps societies and individuals in an inferior position to compete, generates technological dependence and, consequently, economic dependence as well. We must remember that well-being, employment, culture, sustainability in economic and environmental development, the quality of services, ethical values and even the relations between administrators and those who are administered, depends to a large extent on the strategy defined by policy makers with respect to scientific research, innovation and technology.
• What Madrid is and represents today is impossible to understand without considering its long standing commitment with scientific and technological progress and with the modernisation of Spain. In an open and “globalised” society, the future of Madrid will be determined by its ability to promote research and favour an authentic “innovation culture”.
• Madrid, as the important metropolitan region that it is, offers the necessary conditions to become a great research centre of technology and science as well as of invaluable technological services, and aspires to become another node in the world-wide network of the “knowledge regions” that generate innovation and therefore, wealth, social well-being and cultural creativity.
• In this sense, the regional administration, within its obligations, has to take on the responsibility of creating a legal, financial and institutional framework for making the Regional Science and Technology System a reality, a system that will interact openly and constantly with the Spain’s National R&D System and with the European Research and Knowledge Area.
• Thus, with the regional administration backing up, the plan becomes a tool that seeks to formalise a social agreement among the different public and private institutions that make up the Regional Science and Technology System. This agreement must: identify the objectives shared by all those who are involved, define the proposals that will help to increase and efficiently manage the resources available, and, finally, set up a management programme that can be adapted to the ever-changing reality, which will also include control and monitoring mechanisms.
  
• Summarizing, the IV PRICIT promotes the creation of a collective technological, scientific and innovative regional capacity, collaborating with other regions and with the national and international R&D framework. These capacit must generate knowledge and transform it into wealth and well-being. In April 2005 the Madrid Regional Parliament approved the Fourth Regional Scientific Research and Technological Innovation Plan (IV PRICIT) for the period 2005-2008, which represents the regional government’s commitment to placing research, science and technology at the service of its citizens.
  

More information:

• Fourth Regional Scientific Research and Technological Innovation Plan (IV PRICIT)