Kaja Kallas MEP is currently unconvinced there is a case for creating the European Innovation Council (EIC), saying said EU Commissioner for Research Carlos Moedas has “made the correct diagnosis” of the causes of Europe’s poor record in innovation, “but lacks the solution” to this problem.
As Moedas has frequently noted, Europe excels at world-beating science, but struggles to turn this into commercial opportunity.
His answer is the creation of the EIC, as a body which could find promising European start-ups and help them scale-up with seed financing.
Moedas may have demonstrated he understands the problem. But said Kallas, “I’m not really positive right now the EIC is the answer. It seems to me it means another institute, more bureaucracy, another set of officials - and again putting a lot of money into one organisation,” the Estonian MEP told Science|Business.
Kallas questions whether a new agency could find the right horses to back. “I think there’s the potential to make wrong choices. If you’re not in the innovation environment, you are not able to pick winners. I think we should leave room for the market,” she said.
In addition, Kallas is not keen on the idea of the EIC being pitched as a sibling to the EU’s European Research Council, which provides basic research grants to scientists. “This again stresses the division between research and innovation,” she said. “Why create a gap to show these are two separate or even opposite things?”
Why is no one in the Commission talking about, “adding some competencies to the European Research Council and make it the European Research and Innovation Council?” she says.
There are better ways to spur the creation of companies and in Kallas’ view the Commission should resist its usual default of creating a new organisation.
Rather, there should be broader Commission efforts to remove institutional and structural obstacles to innovation, such as the Capital Markets Union initiative to expand venture capital investment or proposals to deepen the single European market in digital services, which have the potential to make the EU a more attractive place to operate a technology business.
Who are the experts?
Moedas has suggested the EIC could bring experts around a table to discuss what rules are holding back the commercialisation of emerging technologies. “Who do you pick for such a panel?” Kallas asked. “The winner of today could be the loser of tomorrow.”
Even entrepreneurs who devise society-shifting inventions, such as the founders of Skype, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, “see the world move on”, and their products superseded by the next generation.
Fair hearing
The Commission is in the process of gathering views on the EIC in a public consultation which runs until the end of April.
If it receives enough backing, the plan is to set up a pilot with funding from the Horizon 2020 research programme.
Despite her scepticism, Kallas said she remains “open to persuasion” on the idea, and will give it a fair hearing when Moedas formally puts his plans before parliament.
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