The European Higher Education Area, as well as the European Research Area are major challenges for the European universities. But, the future role of the higher education institution as a whole is revised nowadays. A more global society, a longlife education, the new technologies for education and research,…, are realities that university must be cope with, specially in the immediate future.

During the last decade of the XXth century, a new revision movement on the mission of the university in this Knowledge Era has emerged. This movement incorporates to the traditional functions of the University of higher education and research, a third one based on the development of the "third mission", organized around three main axes: entrepreneurship, innovation and social commitment. The justificative analysis and the plan to accomplish this new mission successfully is presented as a subject of high importance in the European Union, given the objectives of European Universities towards 2020 for a Europe of Knowledge.

Spanish universities must establish strategic management systems in order to face the challenges of the European Space of Higher Education. The reform of the LOU has not undertaken any change in the governance and management of the institutions to facilitate strategic changes in Spanish universities. Thus, the needed specialisation strategies could be more difficult to implement.

This paper has two objectives. First, to analyze the transition of the R&D & Innovation National Plan from the precedent period (2000-2003) to the new one initial years (2004 and 2005). Second, to study the participation of Madrid Universities, Research Centres, and firms within the R&D & Innovation National Plan. This study allows to compare that participation with the observed participation of other Communities’ one, and also to related to the Plan global data. As a result, the evolution and observed trends of these variables are showed.

Any policy aimed to the wealth growth by means of firms’ creation must be capable to recognize and to characterize the concerned entrepreneurs. This paper tries to determine and to describe those factors that boost technology-based firms’ creation in Madrid.

Surely, great part of the scientific community and even of the society in general can agree. On the contrary, it is quite probable that less agreement exists, in relation to the causes of this distrust, and the investigating youths can help in this sense, to explore new possibilities to solve some of the deficiencies that it presents the system of I+D+I, and that maybe, not to be less visible they lack importance. They are these questions, those that seeks to show the Report INNOVACEF, to try to get some applicable answer to the improvement of this system.