Blog post by Stephen Wyber
Europe spends billions on supporting research, and yet appears to lag behind its rivals in effectively turning great ideas into thriving businesses, which impacts on job creation and competitiveness.
This – the ‘innovation paradox’ – is a regular feature of policy documents and statements in Europe, which look hard for ways to find a solution that would allow the EU’s investment in research to pay off in full. And while the term itself is not used, it is implicitly behind the Letta Report’s flagship call for a fifth freedom – the freedom of circulation of knowledge.
Key stimuli that are currently used to promote and support innovation include generous funding programmes for collaboration between research centres and private actors, technical infrastructures, and guidelines on how to support the ‘valorisation’ of knowledge. This is all intended to ensure that insights generated in Europe’s research institutions turn into new businesses, jobs, and solutions in the wider world.
But for all that these projects weigh positively in the balance, any comprehensive response needs to try and act on the factors that are holding back research-business collaborations that are at heart of so much research work in Europe today. In the knowledge economy, driven by research intensive industries and data-driven innovation, laws that regulate information access and sharing are key.
Currently, however, under European copyright law, researchers involved in public-private partnerships (PPPs) cannot benefit from the same possibilities as their colleagues based in other parts of the world. They are held back from sharing research, and are faced with far more red-tape in order to do things than colleagues not involved in such partnerships. This is something that is often simply too time-consuming and complicated to be practical. As a result, spin-offs from the public research sector face potentially significant additional regulatory requirements which draw away time, finance and energy.
In effect, EU copyright and related laws systematically discriminate against public-private partnerships and knowledge valorisation. The core copyright exception, Article 5(3)(a) of the Information Society Directive is strictly limited to non-commercial research, as are the machine learning provisions in the 2019 CDSM Directive to all intents and purposes. Helpful for our competitors who have no such copyright-induced limitations, but not for researchers with potential competitiveness-boosting ideas in Europe.
The inconsistency between the EU’s strong support for knowledge valorisation, and the simultaneous undermining of this through its copyright laws, represents a further ‘Innovation Paradox’. In effect, Europe’s knowledge economy is trying to drive with the handbrake on.
This issue has been highlighted numerous times before, and is supported by emerging findings from work commissioned by the European Commission’s DG Research, Technology and Development.
This underlines strongly the chilling effect created by the fact that Europe’s current research exception, and stresses the desire of the research community to adopt a more open approach which no longer discriminates between commercial and non-commercial research. The same view also emerged strongly in a report published in the summer of 2022, focused on evaluating how well Europe’s copyright framework support research as it is done today.
Such a provision would not represent a free-for-all. There would need to be legitimate access to materials used for research in the first place, and any results that competed with these materials would not be lawful. What it would mean is that knowledge valorisation would be enabled as public actors and their partners could share information in the context of their research – something our competitors can already do.
With the Competitiveness Council coming up next week, there is an opportunity to start to address this. In particular, Member States could set out their intent to ensure full policy coherence around the partnerships that drive so much research and innovation today.
Ahead of the 2024-29 Parliament and Commission, and complementing the wider agenda opened by the Letta Report’s call for a fifth freedom, there is a chance to take off the handbrake, and work to address this particular innovation paradox.
17 May 2024
