The Eurocrats’ rave

On a typically cloudy Brussels afternoon, the rond-point outside the European Commission’s headquarters building is bustling with workers erecting lights, banners and sound-stage for a big outdoor party.

A rock concert? A political rally? Stranger still: it’s part of the preparations for a big group of politicians and lobbyists here to celebrate EU research policy – a bureaucrats’ “rave” party.

Such is the mounting level of political interest in research and innovation policy in Brussels these days. This particular event, on 7 March, was a formal outdoor ceremony to mark 50 years of Brussels spending money on research – and to celebrate plans to spend buckets more. It follows approval late last year of the biggest-ever EU budget for research, €54 billion, and the launch a week earlier of the EU’s first scientific grants agency, the European Research Council.

The next big thing

But that’s just the start. Up and down the streets around the Commission headquarters, industry and regional-government lobbyists are striving to shape or divine what the next big programme in this field could be. Politicians across the EU have started to make the connection between technology development and economic prosperity, and so a confusing array of proposals, white papers, conferences and task forces has started to appear in Brussels to help determine what the next steps should be.

For instance, on 6 March about 100 lobbyists, local government and Commission officials gathered a few blocks from the EU headquarters to discuss whether innovation policy needs a new “platform,” in Brussels-speak. (Translation: A talking-shop for companies, associations and local government officials to play a role in the Brussels policy debate.)

At the meeting of this European Innovation Dialogue, organised by consulting firm Platte Strauss Partners, nearly a third of the 100 attendees trooped up to the podium to talk – a measure of their intense interest in having their organisations’ voices heard in Brussels. (Full disclosure: This writer was the pro bono moderator.)

The concerns voiced were wildly varied. Future EU policy, argued some, should focus on removing barriers to innovation rather than writing new regulations. No, it should invest in education to manufacture more engineers and scientists.

Another view: it should concentrate on regional investment. No, it should focus on common problems across the EU. It should fill the pipeline with new inventions and patents; it should try first to find markets for the one-third of all European patents that aren’t being exploited by anyone.  

Full agendas

And so the discussion went, a welter of conflicting ideas and views. And that’s just one afternoon of talking. The agendas here are filling with new meetings to air such views (Again, full disclosure: Science|Business is planning an innovation-policy forum 16 March, with a focus on what we see as the newest and most important direction in the field, so-called demand-side policy. But more of that elsewhere.)

To anyone outside Brussels, all this contradictory and confusing talk may seem pointless – but it is part of how policy in this city evolves. Like Washington, Brussels is a one-industry town that does at least some of its thinking out loud. Ideas begin in unlikely places – often outside Brussels, in the national capitals. They start to get discussed here in hotel conference rooms, PDF “white papers”, informal lunch meetings and, if successful, in Commission and Parliament offices. Gradually, a consensus starts emerging over what’s practical. Concrete plans are drafted (these, usually, in private meetings in the Brussels equivalent of the smoke-filled room).

Of course, this being the EU where power is diffused across the continent rather than concentrated as in Washington, often nothing happens at all. But sometimes it does happen. And given the economic importance of technology, the betting here now is that somehow, somewhere, some changes in policy are going to evolve that create new winners and losers. Hence the current frenzy of meetings and ceremonies.

Of course, the hard part is knowing where all the talk is heading. And so, lest they miss an important clue, the true policy aficionados here will show up even for a few government ministers to climb onto a Brussels sound stage for a few polite words. Rock stars, by no means. But they still make good political theatre.