Time for a CTO in Brussels

Richard L. Hudson, CEO and Editor

At a conference here last week, Malcolm Harbour, a British member of the European Parliament, said it out loud. “We ought to have a Chief Technology Officer in the future leadership in the EC. At the moment we’re not having anything like the leadership we should have.” Harbour, who is also vice-chair of the Parliament’s technology-assessment committee, went on to explain that with the ever-growing importance of innovation in the economy, the formation later this year of a new Commission may provide a political opportunity to act.

The suggestion was quickly seconded by others at the conference. Neil Holloway, vice president for business strategy at Microsoft International (the conference organiser), noted that the most successful companies have, “A CEO with someone at his right hand who understands what technology can do for the business.” The same logic should apply in government – though he added that, if the EU appoints a CTO, “make sure they also have an 18-year-old” on hand, with a teenager’s tech instincts, to advise the advisor. Similar sentiments have been voiced in the past – at Nokia and Procter & Gamble, for instance.

Technology management in Brussels has always been a bit like middle-aged dads trying to dance the twist. The Commission’s first R&D architects in the early 1980s, Etienne Davignon and Michel Carpentier, were not what anyone would call tech mavens: the approach they developed simply took the bureaucratic methods of other EU programmes and applied them to bits and molecules. This approach is now big government: the main EU R&D programme, Framework Programme 7, is slated to spend €54.5 billion (including nuclear-power research) over its seven-year cycle – making it one of the world’s largest civilian research programmes.

But wait. Look around the EC organisation chart and you find other pockets of innovation funding – for instance, in competitiveness and regional development (the so-called structural funds.) Then there are policy makers who dabble in different aspects of innovation – small-business policy, taxation, trade, intellectual property – scattered all across the Commission. So the policy process becomes a chaotic clash of rival power groups, both in Brussels and in the national capitals.

And the outcome is – surprise – stalemate. Is it any wonder that, despite its so-called Lisbon Strategy, the EU is spending neither more nor less as a percentage of gross domestic product on R&D than a decade ago? Meanwhile investment levels in China and India have skyrocketed.

Is it likely that the EU will move with the speed of President Obama to factor innovation objectives – new investment in health, education and energy research – into the massive economic stimulus efforts that we now need?

In 2005, the European Policy Centre, a Brussels think-tank, prepared a very good study  that urged the creation of a “Chief Scientific Advisor” reporting directly to the EC President. But that was just dealing with one aspect of the problem: the lack of scientific evidence in routine EU policy formulation.

I would go further. What the EU needs isn’t an advisor, but a leader. The next Commission should include a Vice President whose title is unambiguous: Innovation Commissioner. And the portfolio should be defined to include all the varied strands of innovation policy and funding. Now that would be truly innovative.