Paul Meller, Brussels

Linnar Viik, the Estonian involved in the launch of Skype, has been selected to the 18-strong board of the nascent European Institute of Innovation and Technology.

After frowning on the idea of avoiding patent litigation through arbitration, the European Commission appears to have changed its mind.

After the proposed Small Business Act, now it’s the turn of the European Commission’s wealthiest department – the regional policy directorate – to do its bit for SMEs.

In theory the French EU Presidency’s aims on research and innovation shouldn’t be impeded by fissures in the Lisbon Treaty. In practice, this political crisis will be hugely distracting.

Finland already beats the rest of Europe on R&D spending. Now it plans to boost it still further to 4 per cent of GDP by 2011.

Two days were reserved by the European Patent Office to hear an appeal over the application for a stem cell patent. But only one was needed in the end.

Brussels is abuzz with speculation that Europe’s fragmented, costly and complex patent regime is about to reform – aided by advances in machine translation. But support is not unanimous.

Enabling scientists to go to work in any country in the EU is one of the key planks of the European Research Area. Now member states must be persuaded.

Europe’s politicians claim they are inching towards the Community Patent. But translation is still an issue and a single litigation area remains a distant hope.

Scientists and engineers from Germany, Belgium, the UK and the US scooped the top prizes in the European Innovator of the Year 2008 competition.