The Netherlands take a step towards establishing a Dutch Darpa

A major report on the future of Dutch R&D has recommended setting up a new innovation agency, following the establishment of similar bodies in the UK and Germany.

Peter Wennink, the former chief executive of semiconductor equipment maker ASML, charged with drawing up a national strategy, says the country should create a National Agency for Breakthrough Innovation (NABI) to support disruptive new technologies. 

“The Dutch innovation system is good at promoting incremental innovation, but insufficiently focused on achieving technological breakthroughs that challenge the status quo,” Wennink said in his report, released on December 12. 

NABI would be the latest in a wave of innovation agencies set up across the continent, as Europe experiments with new ways to stimulate new technologies and industries. 

These new agencies are loosely based on the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which emphasises quick funding, bureaucracy-free applications and free-spending, powerful programme managers who can rope in experts to execute an ambitious technological vision. 

In 2018, Germany established Sprind, which has since been praised by European policymakers, including former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi. In 2023, the UK established an Advanced Research and Invention Agency, which works on similar high-risk, high-reward principals. 

The EU’s European Innovation Council, founded in 2018, also says it is moving towards a Darpa-model, establishing competitive challenges like Sprind and freeing up programme managers, although for now largely remains a source of scale-up funding for new companies. France’s Bpifrance, a public investment bank, meanwhile, is scoping out the Sprind model too.  

“Germany and the UK have already established Darpa-like agencies, and France is preparing a similar one. This international movement underscores that the Netherlands can no longer do without such a vehicle,” Wennink says in his report. 

Wennink argues that the Darpa model “yields significantly more disruptive breakthroughs than traditional grant models.” 

He wants NABI to be independent of the government, with a mission to develop “groundbreaking technologies” in four strategic areas of R&D: digitalisation and artificial intelligence; security and resilience; energy and climate technology; and life sciences and biotechnology. 

Like Darpa, it should have “autonomous” programme managers to “actively help steer R&D projects.” Public procurement would then help these new technologies to actually get off the ground. 

Accountants running the show?

However, whether NABI will be implemented precisely as Wennink envisages is unclear.

The two parties currently negotiating to form the next Dutch government have committed to establishing a Darpa-like body, said Robert-Jan Smits, former president of Eindhoven University of Technology.

However, he went on, they want to place it directly under the Ministry of Defence, rather than creating an arm’s length body as Wennink suggests. 

“Just like in Germany [when it established Sprind], it will require dedicated legislation which will have to be approved by Parliament, notably to let the agency operate in a fast and flexible way and avoid that it will be stifled by red tape and all kinds of control and supervisory bodies and even worst, by accountants running the show ,” he said. 

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“I suspect a type of NABI will be implemented, whatever government will emerge, but it is unclear in what way it will be controlled, and whether or not it will focus on defence related innovation,” said Marcel de Heide, lead economist at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research.

Still, he thinks a NABI could play a role in boosting Dutch growth, not least by making the government a better customer of new technologies. “Public procurement is not well coordinated in the Netherlands; and focused primarily on specifications instead of solutions,” he said. 

The Wennink report comes just as the Netherlands is winding down a multi-billion euro National Growth Fund, which means “a gap has emerged in the stimulation of innovation,” said Ruben Puylaert, a spokesman for Universities of the Netherlands, an academic umbrella body. 

“We therefore view the idea of a NABI stepping in to fill that gap positively,” he said. “It appears to be a promising idea, although much will depend on the precise details of its implementation.”