Debate: New European innovation agenda
Date: WEDNESDAY, 18 OCTOBER 2023
Speaker: Christian Ehler
Country: Spain
Language: EN

Yesterday we had a debate on the 2024 budget, where the Council shamelessly cuts innovation. It is almost an annual ritual. I pointed it out there, and many other colleagues, and I will repeat it now: without innovation, we fail on our climate, on our digital objective, but also on the general objective of changing our societies using technologies, using innovation as a comparative advantage for the European economy. Without innovation, we cannot build a modern society. That is why it was so essential that with this new European innovation agenda we are getting back to taking innovation policy really seriously.  I have to admit that this is late in the term, and we had been slightly confused that DG RTD rightly have been presenting an innovation agenda, but it seems to have become a little bit fashionable. I mean, we have a slightly bewildered DG BUDG, who never was suspected to have any idea about innovation, who brought forward an innovation platform, a financial instrument using headlines actually not existing for innovation before. Deep digital was not just a flaw, but it illustrated that it seems to be now a little bit fashionable to work on that. Commissioner Breton had been bringing forward 10 new innovative strategies. We have a lot of programmes, we have a lot of ambitions, but you also called for – and we did call for – an innovation agenda. I think it had been high time that DG RDT had brought forward a straight, understandable agenda: what we should do together with the Member States to bring innovation at the forefront.  We need to foster the development of new knowledge and technology. We need to foster the development of new ideas for products and services. We need to foster our ability to turn technologies and ideas into market-ready products and services. We need to make it easier for our industry and start-ups to scale up innovations once they are brought to the market. To achieve all this, we need the Member States to buy in. The new European innovation agenda with its flagships is doing exactly that. Just like we have been doing for the European Research Area, we now have a policy agenda for innovation in Europe we can discuss. But also we embrace the idea that this is not an isolated ambition of the Commission and the Parliament: it is a European agenda we have to develop and we have to align behind. So now it is about deliveries. That is why I deeply believe that this specific policy agenda needs to be combined with a more general approach to making the internal market more friendly towards innovation. This means lowering the regulatory burden and more rigidly implementing the innovation principle. This means further rolling out regulatory sandboxes, this means developing a substantial policy agenda on technology infrastructures. However, most of this means investing in science, research and innovation, and we are still not investing the 3 % of GDP which had been announced almost 20 years ago by the Council. In 2021, we got stuck with 2.27 %, while the US stands at 3.46 %, and South Korea even at almost 5 %. We are also not investing enough in the European framework programmes: just for the first two years, Horizon would have needed an additional EUR 34 billion to fund all excellent proposals. This is only for the calls that are actually put out, because we also know that we are currently not investing enough in early research. If we want to fund enough early research, applied research and innovation to ensure long-term ability to innovate, we would need at least EUR 200 billion for the next framework programme. That needs to be part of our long-term European innovation agenda.