Viewpoint: Europe collaborates in research, but does it innovate together?

Over the past two decades, Europe has built an impressive ecosystem for collaborative research. Universities and research institutes today often work seamlessly across EU borders through Horizon Europe collaborative projects, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and European Research Area policies. Scientific collaboration in Europe is increasingly transnational, competitive and globally visible.

But this does not translate into Europe-wide progress in innovation in comparison to countries like the US and China. Therefore, an important but uncomfortable question remains largely unasked: have we achieved the same level of integration in innovation?

In the US, innovations developed in one state are quickly visible, accessible and scalable across the entire country. A technology emerging in Colorado can rapidly attract interest from companies, investors or industrial partners in California, Massachusetts or Texas. National laboratories such as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado operate with a clear mandate not only to generate knowledge, but to transfer it efficiently to industry across the whole country, not only in their local environment.

Europe, by contrast, appears to lack such a unified innovation space. While research projects are often multinational, the pathways through which inventions reach companies, investors and markets remain too often national or even local. An important technological breakthrough in Sweden may remain unknown to potential industrial partners in France or Italy. If the country of origin lacks a strong industrial base in the sector in which an invention was made, promising innovations can struggle to find a home and a market.

This fragmentation is not a question of scientific quality. European research is among the best in the world. Rather, it reflects a missing transnational flow of innovation: of information, capital, entrepreneurial attention and industrial uptake. Technology transfer offices, venture capital networks and start-up ecosystems tend to operate within national boundaries, shaped by language, regulation, funding structures and risk cultures. As a result, many innovations circulate efficiently within countries, but only weakly across Europe as a whole.

Innovation radar

Europe has to some extent recognised this challenge. Instruments such as the European Innovation Council and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology Knowledge and Innovation Communities are important steps forward. Additionally, many European university alliances are actively collaborating and developing common policies on innovation and technology transfer strategies. Yet these remain programme-based solutions, reaching selected projects rather than creating a systemic, market-driven European innovation network. They do not yet function as a continent-wide innovation radar that allows companies and investors to easily discover, assess and scale technologies regardless of where in Europe they originate.

The cost of this fragmentation is rarely made explicit. It is paid in slower time-to-market, missed industrial opportunities and European inventions that ultimately scale elsewhere, often in US. In a global landscape defined by rapid technological change and strategic competition, this is a vulnerability Europe can not afford.

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Europe has succeeded in building a common research area. The next challenge is more difficult, but no less urgent: to build a genuinely integrated European innovation area, where ideas, technologies and entrepreneurial ambition move across borders as freely as researchers already do. 

Until then, Europe risks remaining excellent at discovery, but hesitant in deployment. This is a scenario recognised in many documents, including the Draghi and Heitor reports, as a reason why Europe lags behind the US and other countries in technological development. This lack of integration may prove to be the decisive gap in the decades ahead.

Missed opportunities

For European businesses, this fragmentation is not an abstract policy issue; it is a missed opportunity. Valuable technologies developed with public funding often remain invisible beyond their country of origin, while companies searching for innovation look abroad, sometimes to the US or Asia, simply because discovery mechanisms there are faster and clearer. This weakens Europe’s ability to translate scientific excellence into competitive advantage and industrial leadership.

If Europe is serious about strengthening its economy and technological sovereignty, innovation must become as borderless for companies as research already is for scientists. Business leaders, investors and policymakers should share a common interest in creating European-scale mechanisms for technology discovery, transfer and scale-up, platforms that connect research institutions, start-ups, established companies and capital across national boundaries. 

The next phase of Europe’s competitiveness will not be decided by how well we collaborate in research, but by how effectively we commercialise and scale innovation together across European borders.

Gregor Majdič is rector of the University of Ljubljana.