EU should take bolder research bets, says Commission’s adviser on innovation

A report published on Tuesday is looking for the EU to spend big on new medicines, genomics, brain, research and applications of quantum physics, and says EU administrators need to make riskier investments.

“Budgetary and control authorities need to give approval for funds to flow less tidily if we are to truly support innovation. Funders must have discretion to give greater weight to critical mass bets and less to spreading support thinly across a score of clusters doing much the same thing,” report says.

The note, written by Robert Madelin, former director general at DG Connect and now adviser on innovation at the European Political Strategy Centre, the Commission’s new think tank, makes a range of suggestions for making Europe an innovation-friendly continent.

For a start, Madelin suggests stripping back administrative hassle for researchers applying to the EU Horizon 2020 research programme, saying current funding rules are too often unfit for the purposes of the entrepreneurial university or innovative private researcher. “The conditions for EU funding continue to deter some excellent teams in some excellent institutions from even bothering to read the H2020 calls,” he claims.

Another idea is that researchers should get more money to spend on promoting their ideas. “We need to allow expenses in such taboo fields as marketing, which has traditionally been viewed as too far from the lab bench,” the report says.

Elsewhere, Madelin makes a strong case for protecting the EU’s fundamental research budget. “The innovation mission of Europe cannot succeed overall if it is accompanied by a drift away from fundamentals: US fundamental research spending was increased, not reduced, for the Kennedy moon-shot. The success to date of our own big research bets, notably in the Human Brain Project, suggests that, beyond the recently announced Quantum Flagship, future similarly ambitious endeavours should be launched.”

Another section says that the EU-backed European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a huge collaborative programme of 800 universities and companies, is an “as yet under-valued asset”.

Madelin was aided by a taskforce of 20 volunteers drawn from across five Commission departments of education, industry, the Joint Research Centre, communications and research, in drawing up the report

The decision on whether to act on any of the report’s ideas will rest with the Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker. Madelin’s role as innovation adviser was created last June and will end in September.

The report was widely anticipated in Brussels after Madelin gave a seminar on 31 May, attended by Brussels lobbyists and policy makers.

Science|Business had obtained what we were told was a copy of the report summary distributed at the meeting. But when asked about it directly Madelin said he didn’t “acknowledge authorship” of the document and insisted we had been "misled" into thinking it was a summary of his views. So Science|Business withheld publication.

In the end, the final report released today bears a very close resemblance to the summary denied by Madelin.

When asked again about this, Madelin said, “I didn’t deny authorship. I said it wasn’t mine. Authorship is when you sign something and I hadn’t signed it.” He added, “It was definitely my goal in that exchange that you would not de-flower the report.”

Building entrepreneurial universities

Arguably the report’s most specific suggestion is that universities keep their stake in spin-outs and patents as low as possible.  “The role of [university tech transfer offices] must shift decisively from creating value for the university up-front to supporting the creation of value by students and faculty,” the report says.

“TTOs tend to seek too great a piece of the action, deterring some investigators from the enterprise and weighing down the prospects of the rest. Evidence from Asia, Europe and America is clear: small shares on founding (3-5 per cent maximum) and big support is the way to success.”

Madelin cites the Eindhoven University of Technology as having fostered a strong entrepreneurial environment, producing a very high proportion of papers co-authored by industry.

Of its 300 professors, a half work full-time and are employed by the university. “The other half are part-time, and about 80 per cent of staff in this group are employed by industry, splitting their time between working at the university and working in business. The university funds half the cost of long-term research programmes with industry, as long as the academics involved can secure the rest of the funding from business, but refuses to conduct research with industry that cannot be published.”

Shake up EU work culture

The report suggests EU public services should get a redesign. One idea is to create cross-department innovation task forces in the Commission and European Parliament.

Madelin says he is interested in fostering a better form of engagement internally in the institutions which would see them fill, “With passionate, self-starting creatives rather than merely obedient and diligent experts.”

In addition, the Commission should, “Devote more effort to deeply rethinking what evidence for policy needs to be if policy is to remain legitimate and effective.”

The failed chief science adviser experiment and the current Science Advice Mechanism, a collective of seven leading scientists, point in the right general direction. “But we still lack designated senior scientists embedded in each policy pillar and networked across the public administration,” the report says.