The gravity shifts: the EU and the Eastern challenge

The research sun is rising...

The cocktail of fast-growing markets, state funding of research and rising affluence is attracting scientists, business development managers and entrepreneurs from the West to live and work in these countries. They bring management skills, money, contacts and ambition.

In the past 30 years manufacturing and financial services have gone global: now the same is happening to innovation. Many have questioned how Europe should respond. The latest contribution from the London-based think tank Demos says the EU needs to ready itself for a world of global innovation networks in which idea and technologies come from many more places.

“It needs to act now, while Asia’s innovation capacity is still developing, and not in ten year’s time when it is already too late,” says the report, ‘The Atlas of Ideas: Europe and Asia in the New Geography of Science and Innovation’.

This means making more investment in science and innovation, and making international collaborations more central to ways of working. It also means hard decisions such as picking which specialisms to pursue, merging science programmes with member states and collaborating with the US and Asia to get economies of scale, reforming how science is funded to promote interdisciplinary research, pursuing the creation of elite universities and strengthening links between universities, business and finance.

Sound familiar?

In many senses none of this is new. Over the past decade politicians and policymakers have become increasingly twitchy over Europe’s standing in the global innovation stakes. The most potent symbol of this is the millennial fervour behind the Lisbon Strategy, which in its first iteration in March 2000, set out the ambition to make Europe, “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010.”

By the time former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok picked up his pen in 2004 to review progress, it was abundantly clear the target would not be met. Kok’s report highlighted multiple factors holding Europe back, including lack of mobility of researchers, inability to attract and retain world class scientists, not enough money, low salaries for scientists and the cost of protecting intellectual property.

Next it was the turn of Esko Aho, who as Prime Minister of Finland in the early 1990s is credited in turning the economy around after the break-up of the Soviet Union pulled the rug out from under the country’s finances. His study of what was going wrong with the Lisbon strategy, published in January 2006, called for a “pact for research and innovation” and told the EU to use the financial firepower of public procurement to drive the development of high tech markets in healthcare, building and construction and cleantech.

While it states that the Lisbon target of spending 3 per cent of gross domestic product on research and development was never realistic, Demos does cites some progress in moves to create an innovation-friendly environment. These include the substantial increase in funding in Framework Programme 7, and the launch this year of the European Research Council.

On the other hand, the European Institute of Technology will be a very slight version of the original vision, if and when, it gets off the drawing board, and patent law remains a feast of embarrassment that no amount of eurofudge can sweeten.

So what now?

Demos’ recommendations fall into four categories.

Firstly, the EU should unleash mass collaboration. “The European Union should evangelise for the globalisation of knowledge, by advocating and exemplifying cosmopolitan principles of open science and innovation.”

Important steps have been taken in this area. FP7 is better resourced than FP6 and getting grants is a less cumbersome process. Most importantly, applicants in non EU countries are on a more equal footing.

Despite this, a glaring inconsistency persists between the importance that EU leaders claim to attach to innovation and the proportion of the budget that is allocated to it.

The 2008/09 review of the spending priorities is a chance to do something about this, says Demos. “Beginning now, the case should be made for a further and more substantial increase in funding for R&D.”

Within this expanded budget, international collaboration should continue to attract more emphasis and investment. Research cooperation should become a more explicit and substantive component of the EU’s foreign relations with countries such as China and India.

Attracting talent

Secondly, Europe should become a magnet for skills. Europe’s future as a home for science and innovation rests on attracting and retaining links with the best talent.

Policy-makers need a richer and more detailed understanding of the position of EU member states in international talent flows and of the relationship between migration and innovation. Demos says the Commission should research talent flows and publish an annual report including a scorecard of member states’ attractiveness to international researchers.

At the same time Europe’s universities should change their international strategies from the existing model in which maximising student numbers is the principal objective, to a collaborative model, where research links and joint projects take far greater priority.

Scholarships and exchanges are critical as a means of strengthening collaborative networks. The principal mechanism enabling overseas researchers to come to Europe is the Marie Curie programme. But from 2002 to 2006 an average of only 18 students a year came from China, India and Korea. Over the same period, fewer than three Marie Curie fellows per year went from Europe to third countries other than the US, Canada and Australia.

Demos says a more targeted approach should be developed, with a particular share of fellowships allocated to key partner countries, and better promotion of these opportunities within those countries.

European should aim to be the host with the most, with the world’s best scientific conferences, the place where researchers feel most valued and where they receive the greatest recognition, in terms of both prestige and pay.

Mapping the new geography of science

Thirdly, Europe needs to build knowledge banks. More science is coming from more people in more places, and the results are not necessarily being published first in the mainstream international journals.

The EU should invest more in understanding this new geography of science and innovation, and in gathering and distributing that information more effectively. Collaboration strategies can then be tailored to the individual and complementary strengths of particular countries.

Europe has gradually been taking on a more proactive role in fostering links with the research communities of third countries. There is scope for greater resources to be invested in these activities but first the delicate question of whether to go for bilateral links, or pan Europeans relationship needs to be answered.

The Commission’s delegations in China and India have one science counsellor each, in South Korea there is none. By contrast, several EU member states have large teams of science counsellors and advisers working in these countries.

Global goals

Fourthly, Europe should lead science towards global goals, over and above the current objectives of building global markets and brands, by standing up for the contribution science can make to solving shared environmental and social challenges.

The global innovation networks being created by multinational companies need public counterparts that serve the global public interest.

Europe has some large collaborations to build on, such as the ITER fusion research programme. Demos says the same model should be adapted for a small number of critical science-based challenges, for example in low-carbon energy, sustainable transport, the prevention of pandemic diseases.

Above all, Europe needs an approach to innovation that is not just about the scientific elite, the trendy creative class or entrepreneurs, but which recognises the contribution that everyone can make as consumers, citizens and creators. Europe should be portrayed as a place that is open to the world’s best ideas, and which will support anyone from anywhere to put those ideas into practice.