A report by the EC published this week highlighting the EU’s R&D expenses and results states that, despite early technology leads, the EU has created few companies that now dominate new markets. In the last fifteen years, the EU share of the world gross expenditures in research and innovation has fallen from 25 to 20% while both its world output of scientific publications and its share of world’s patents dropped from 33% to 25%.This relative decline has incentivized the EC to find new ways of boosting its R&D competitiveness.
The first point mentioned in the report for that purpose was to attract more top companies. Central to EU plans to generate more innovation from its future research programme is the creation of the European Innovation Council (EIC) which role will be to help scale up more world-class tech companies in Europe, and help innovators more easily find support from Brussels.
The report also emphasized defence as a provider of highly-skilled jobs and a turnover of nearly€100 billion and underlined its contribution to the wider EU economy. However, the report also acknowledges that defence system development is both very long term and very high risk, taking many years, sometimes even decades to yield significant resuts.
The latest point highlighted was the importance for poor member states. While Horizon 2020 only represents 10 per cent of total public R&D spending in the EU, the programme constitutes a comparatively much greater boost for austerity ravaged countries such as Cyprus Malta or even Romania. However, the report shows that the poorer EU-13 member states are getting less out of EU research than they did in 2007-2013. There is no question that finding ways to boost their research and innovation capacity will remain an ongoing challenge for the efficiency of EU investment.
