Blog post by Stephen Wyber
No Competitiveness (Compass) Without Research
Even before the publication of its Work Plan for 2025, the European Commission had already issued a key document that takes forwards work on a theme that came up repeatedly at the hearings for potential Commissioners last year: competitiveness.
The Competitiveness Compass picks up from the Draghi and Letta reports, setting out a series of plans in order to help Europe keep up with other countries. This, they suggest, is essential in order to be able to maintain our social model, as well as to find the solutions to global challenges.
Innovation has a clear place at the heart of this, and in particular the innovation gap – the ability to ‘translate ideas into new, marketable technologies, and [to] integrate those technologies into its industrial base’.
The Compass sets out a positive goal: ‘Europe must be the place where tomorrow’s technologies, services, and clean products are invented, manufactured and marketed, as we stay the course to climate neutrality. A Europe that remains home to cutting-edge scientific and research innovation’.
This last vision brings up an important – and too often overlooked – connection – that between research and innovation. While the two words are often used together, in reality they have all too often been treated in isolation. Research is seen as the preserve of public institutions (universities, research institutions and their libraries), supported with funding, while innovation is left to the private sector, facilitated by regulation.
The problem is that researchers too need regulations and laws that support them, enabling them to pursue their ideas. Moreover, the line between research and innovation is a blurred one, with research-industry collaborations actively promoted by governments, alongside support for spin-offs and knowledge transfer.
Moving Forward Together: A Bolder, Simpler, Smarter Union
Taking inspiration from the European Commission’s 2025 Work Programme tagline “Moving forward together: A Bolder, Simpler, Faster Union”, Knowledge Rights 21 thinks it’s time for a bolder, simpler and smarter Union.
Any meaningful work on competitiveness and innovation therefore needs to consider how to facilitate research, including research collaborations. Europe needs a new, comprehensive approach to supporting research and education institutions, and the libraries within them, in order to achieve its competitiveness goals.
Looking at the different suggestions included in the compass, there are certainly opportunities to do this:
A Start-Up and Scale-Up Strategy: this is likely to be an early move, aiming to address barriers faced by new companies. While this will need to look at questions around access to capital and cross-border working, it should also explore what may be standing in the way of collaboration with universities and research centres. In particular, we argue that the barriers to commercial research included in copyright laws can have a chilling effect on collaborations and even future start-ups.
A European Innovation Act: similarly, the Compass highlight this, and its focus on ‘the access of innovative companies to European research and technology infrastructures, intellectual assets generated by publicly funded R&I in view of increasing patenting, and regulatory sandboxes allowing innovators to develop and test new ideas’. A clear support for progress here will be both enabling research-industry collaborations (as above), and stronger steps to ensure open access to research results.
A Data Union Strategy: this looks to address the growing awareness that a lack of access to data is a major handicap to AI development. Unfortunately, of course, this lack is arguably down to the EU’s own decision to allow mass opt-outs from text-and-data mining exceptions in copyright law, as well as to seek to regulate AI by regulating its training. Given this restriction, efforts to build datasets will inevitably be harder than necessary, but we will need to monitor the Strategy, as well as the proposed EU Cloud and AI Development Act to see if improvements are possible.
Nonetheless, one positive from work around a Data Union could be to correct some of the flaws in previous legislation which make it unduly difficult for researchers to gain access to data. They should at least be able to do so on the same terms as SMEs.
A CERN for AI: a high-profile proposal is that of developing an equivalent of CERN for AI. With China now demonstrating that it can be an actor in this space, it is understandable that Europe should want similar access to computing power. Of course, success here will depend on the laws around access to and use of materials mentioned above for training, but it will also be important to ensure that this does not become a distraction from the possibility to use – and train – AI in research institutions across Europe.
Policy coordination: the compass calls broadly for work to ensure better alignment of national and European policies around competitiveness, arguing that ‘Europe is falling short of what it could achieve by acting together because its industrial and research policies are fragmented between the EU and Member States and across multiple, uncoordinated objectives’.
This is another theme that has certainly been a priority for Knowledge Rights 21, where we have underlined concern that the needs of researchers and the libraries that support them are too often dealt with in a scattered way. In addition to the complexity this causes, there are also contradictions, with declarations of support for research-industry collaborations on the one hand, but then also copyright and other laws that make these harder.
The Compass implies that the answers here are stronger assessments of impacts on SMEs, as well as coordination of investments and policies on specific technologies. All of these could be helpful, but what is really needed is a proper focus on the research sector as a whole.
Towards a Research Compass?
As underlined in Knowledge Rights 21’s Action Plan – knowledge for a stronger Europe – we need to ensure that supporting research, researchers and research institutions is a priority across the EU’s action. The European Research Area Act is a very promising step here, but these same goals need to be integrated into all of the initiatives set out above, and steps in each area coordinated.
Moreover, the effects on research should also be added clearly to the list of considerations when carrying out any impact assessment, and regulatory fitness tests should see researchers and research institutions as a key stakeholder group to consult. Making sure that research voices are present in discussions at all levels can help lock in a culture of prioritising research, as a prior and necessary condition for achieving wider competitiveness goals.
It is perhaps time for the EU to develop a research compass, bringing together clearly the different strands of its work that shape – and ideally support – research, in order to achieve the best results possible.
18 February 2025
