How to fix Europe's broken innovation machine

Why do so many European inventions get lost in the move from lab to market? Science|Business suggests 9 simple ways that European leaders could fix that problem – for the benefit of Europe’s economy.

In the 1980s, it was fashionable for European politicians to fret about the “technology gap” between the old and new worlds: the US dominated trade in computers, software, airplanes and missiles. To redress the balance, Europe mustered billions in government subsidies for its failing tech industries. A generation later, only the aerospace industry has really responded – yet once again, the EU is planning a new round of tech subsidies, in its €50.5 billion, seven-year Framework 7 programme. Will it do any good?

At Science|Business, an independent news service founded to report on how ideas do (or don’t) get from lab to market, we believe it’s time for the politicians to stop fussing about the spending gap between the US, Europe or China – and focus instead on a different kind of gap, between industry and academia. Into that gap falls the patent that goes unexploited, the research report that gets ignored, or the researcher who leaves for richer labs in San Francisco or Singapore. That gap – between business and science– is at the root of Europe’s chronic underperformance in technology.

In Europe, “a high percentage of the results of intellectual production has stayed on the shelf, unused by the broader society,” says Herwig Schlögl, former deputy secretary-general of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.  “We recognise a big gap in Europe: How to bring the business community closer to the universities, and vice versa?”

On 13 September 2006, the European Commission attempted to address some of these issues, in a public memorandum presented by Vice President Gunter Verheugen: “Ten priority actions to achieve a broad-based innovation strategy for the European Union.” For the most part, it misses the point; it encompasses a set of old or borrowed policies that rely too much on government intervention and not enough on the power of the scientific marketplace in Europe. To achieve success, “all we need is the political will,” Verheugen said. Indeed. We believe the answers to Europe’s problems are both simpler and more direct: Fundamental and immediate change is needed in the way most European countries fund and run their universities, in the way they tax investment and administer patents, and in the way they regulate labour and markets.

This Innovation Manifesto summarises some of these necessary changes. It is based on an unusual Roundtable discussion we organised on 7 March 2006 in Paris, among 27 leaders in European academia and industry, to debate how to bridge the gap between the two. Participants included the OECD’s Schlögl, France Telecom’s R&D director, Microsoft’s chairman emeritus for Europe, the rector of ETH-Zürich and many others. (See full list at the back of the Manifesto.) It was hosted by ParisTech, the association of France’s Grandes Écoles in science and technology; conducted at ParisTech member École des Mines de Paris; and supported by Microsoft.

While we quote some of our Roundtable guests in this report, we do not wish to imply they endorse all or any of the individual suggestions for change that we present here. In any open debate such as this, there will be differences of opinion. But we do thank our guests for their suggestions and eloquence.

This year and next, under the Finnish and German presidencies of the EU, many important decisions will be made – decisions that will affect the way the scientific and technological world in Europe works, or doesn’t. This Manifesto is an independent, largely liberal-markets view on what is to be done. We present it in an effort to broaden the debate beyond the usual core of technocrats – to engage wider comment, and genuinely new thinking, on the problems of Europe.

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