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Europe preaches the knowledge society, but its aversion to risk and reluctance to change has got to go, warns Esko Aho, former prime minister of Finland.

On 26 January, in London, Science|Business organised a roundtable of executives in the biotech industry to discuss the state of the market. The consensus: investor appetite for biotech companies is on the rise.

"There is a large gap between the rhetoric of a political system that preaches the Knowledge Society and the reality of budgetary and other priorities that have shown little shift in preparing to engage with it." Esko Aho, former Prime Minister of Finland, in Creating an Innovative Europe, January 2006.

Ireland's fastest-growing companies hired even more aggressively than other top job-creating European companies during 2001-2004, according to a survey conducted by Entrepreneurs for Growth, a membership-based organisation representing 2,000 European firms.

TU Delft ditched the usual model of outlicensing or seeking venture capital backing when it was looking to commercialise a novel wastewater treatment technology.

Last month the world's leading pharmaceutical company received simultaneous FDA approval for two new therapies. Yet neither drug was invented by the company. Both were originally developed by small biotechs.

Dental implant company Neoss Ltd raised £5 million in its third funding round, enabling it to further develop the technology and expand its sales and marketing operations.