Europe plays innovation catch-up
Published: 07 Dec 2005 12:05 GMT
...to happen you need to have a national policy of support for companies that support this research, and this is true for a number of EU member states that are already above the 3 percent threshold, e.g. with Sweden up to 4 percent and Finland very close to that.
Other EU countries need to catch up, by instituting the right policies. This can be done in different ways of course, including tax incentives, and better cooperation between industry and academia. Studies have shown that cooperation between industry and academia is better in countries like the UK and the Nordic states than in, for example, Italy, or Greece.
One method that you have talked about in the past is the concept of "Innovation procurement" can you explain what you mean by this term?
There are a number of things that we have to get right in Europe, for innovation does not depend only on increasing the level of research in industry. You also need the first buyers so that the technology user is also involved in the research.
Historically, we have been very good at this in Europe. Companies like Siemens, Nokia and Alcatel would not have existed without the technology procurement from the old telecoms companies. But we have lost a little bit of that touch in Europe, and if you look at the Americans they are still doing so well on innovation because they have a lot of procurement from defence and space, something that we hardly have in Europe.
I think we should find our way back towards doing this, but doing it in a European way. We should also use the competition aspect of it, because technology procurement can be done at a European level as well as a national level. We see this as a way of helping companies take the first step from research to product, by sharing the risk with companies developing a new technology.
We now have a working group between the Directorate-General for Information Society and Media and EU member states. I chair this group and we will be producing a report in a couple of months that looks into the possibilities of innovation procurement. After all, we already have EU-wide procurement policies on defence with the establishment of European battle groups, so defence could be a promising area. Space can also play a role through the European Space Agency, but both are much smaller than the US. However, we also have other areas, such as security, health, education, and support for the elderly and disabled.
Risk capital is also very important for innovation and we would be helped if there were some sort of European NASDAQ that is large enough to enable investors to spread their risk.
Is the poor performance in European ICT R&D partly due to deficiencies in EU or national laws and regulations relating to intellectual property rights, should we be placing greater emphasis upon open source communities, and patent commons?
We are positive about open source, although it is not a requirement for participation in European programmes. We will benefit from having a lot of open source. It is good for Europe. If we go to the intellectual property rights (IPR) question the...
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