The importance of research for Europe’s global competitiveness is widely agreed on, so it was reassuring to see that acknowledged in the new European Commission’s “competitiveness compass”, published last week.
However, for a document aimed at articulating a coherent five-year strategy to ensure Europe’s economic and technological position in the world, it shows an alarmingly poor understanding of how research and innovation actually work.
September’s seminal Draghi report, commissioned by commission president Ursula von der Leyen herself, made a strong case that Europe must invest in new and advanced technologies, where the continent has clearly fallen behind. It advised the European Union to increase its research funding and overcome the fragmentation of its framework programme, Horizon Europe, by concentrating on fewer, more impactful instruments. The report, by former Italian prime minister and European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, also called for better conditions for innovation, from overcoming regulatory barriers to completing the single market for capital.
Crucially, Draghi identified the need to focus on both cutting-edge research and its translation to breakthrough innovation. That is why he advocated for doubling investment in the European Research Council (ERC), alongside strengthening a reformed European Innovation Council (EIC) led by scientists and innovation experts.
His analysis formed the basis of October’s Heitor report, which concentrated on how the next Framework Programme, FP10, might boost the EU’s competitiveness in practice, through concentration and simplification, building on instruments that already work well.
As the new College of Commissioners prepared to take office at the beginning of December, it became possible to gauge the building blocks of FP10. The commission announced a flurry of initiatives, including on research and technology infrastructures, in three thematic areas – AI, life sciences and advanced materials. Alongside a boosted (autonomous) ERC and EIC, observers expected collaborative research across the entire research pipeline to be supported to help Europe catch up in these areas.
However, while the competitiveness compass asserts the need to turn Draghi’s recommendations into action, it sets out nothing of the sort. It wants Europe to “be the place where tomorrow’s technologies, services, and clean products are invented, manufactured, and marketed”. But it focuses almost exclusively on how disruptive innovation can be encouraged and products scaled up.
How will new knowledge be created? How will Europe actually invent tomorrow’s technologies? On this, the compass is silent. Its only reference to “future EU research funding” promises a “more strategic” approach to supporting “the transition from applied research to the scale-up phase”.
In other words, research funding will not be used to fund research – not even applied research – but what happens after that, as production is scaled up to reach the market. Yet what good is it to bring to market products in fields where Europe is already behind globally?
Throughout the compass, there is a clear determination to better align national and European strategies. In principle, that is a good thing: but not if national instruments are tied to a European vision of research that is dissociated from reality. If the EU wants to incentivise EU member states to align more closely, it needs to be persuasive, not least to those who need to do the work – researchers and innovators.
The compass confirms anxieties in the sector that funding for research (such as it is) and innovation will be channelled through a competitiveness fund. Through this fund, we are promised total integration and effectiveness, as projects will be supported throughout their journey “from research, through scale-up, industrial deployment, to manufacturing”.
This may be nirvana for policymakers, but it is futile as a research strategy. Breakthrough discoveries cannot be predicted, and the journey from research to innovation through to industrial deployment is complex and often serendipitous. Funding mechanisms must allow for failure.
The competitiveness compass, then, brings together many of the initiatives promised by the commission-in-waiting in the second half of last year. But it lacks the central underpinning needed by any strategy to ensure Europe can catch up in the race for advanced new knowledge in critical fields of research.
Ursula von der Leyen has a choice to make. One option is to invest the EU’s next multi-annual financial framework in trying to scale up what we already know and have. But Europe cannot catch up on AI and other advanced technology by business as usual. Nor will its societies be better supported in making the best – and fairest – use of Europe’s advanced technologies.
Her other, much better option is to invest in Europe’s future, starting with research. FP10 must not only double the funding for an autonomous ERC and increase support for a transformed EIC. It must also create effective collaborative instruments across the entire research pipeline, including bottom-up research. And we need an FP10 that is open to the world, combining the EU’s research prowess with that of associated research and innovation systems beyond its borders.
None of this is likely to transform Europe’s economy in the next five years. But it will ensure the EU’s long-term competitiveness and possibly even its survival in an increasingly fragmented, nationalist environment. And, most importantly, it will work.
Jan Palmowski is secretary general of the Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities.
