This event, which will take place both as a round table and a workshop, will bring together around 30 participants from academia, policy, industry, and private practice. Building on the momentum of Mario Draghi’s report on the future of Europe’s competitiveness, the event aims to seize this opportunity and help shape a 'coalition of the willing' to advance the implementation of the Draghi Reforms.
On 9 September 2024, Mario Draghi presented his report on the future of Europe’s competitiveness to the European Commission. Draghi’s diagnosis is dismal. Economic growth in Europe has been substantially slower than the US, while China has been catching up. Europe is getting smaller.
Much, if not all, of Europe’s economic gap is driven by lower productivity. The missing engine of prosperity underpinning the differential with the US and China’s higher competitiveness is digital technology. Put simply, Europe has not created and diffused digital technology at a sufficient scale.
The issue is not trivial, it is existential. Europe is falling behind. If Europe wants to keep providing public goods like welfare, decarbonisation, or defense, to its citizens, it must bridge the tech gap.
How to move forward? The Draghi report identifies five main fault lines. First, once businesses reach the growth stage, regulation and jurisdictional hurdles prevent them from scaling up, seeking opportunities outside of Europe. Second, there are not enough academic institutions achieving top levels of excellence. Researchers in Europe are less well integrated into innovation clusters, with ecosystems of universities, startups, large companies, and venture capital organisations. Third, public R&D spending is insufficiently focused on disruptive innovation, and insufficiently federal. Fourth, private funding of R&D is too low. Venture capital funding is underdeveloped, reflecting not just a supply side problem on the money market, but also less demand from young firms for finance in a fragmented and incomplete single market. Last, the EU regulatory stance towards tech companies hampers innovation. Too many barriers incentivise companies in Europe to « stay small ». The problem is this: « size enables adoption ».
Bold leadership and a clear implementation roadmap are needed to solve these predicaments. The problem, however, today is that the message of the Draghi report risks getting lost, or that only partial and limited remedies will be brought to the above problems owing to institutional inertia and political infighting. As scholars, practitioners and citizens, we’re interested in creating a coalition of the willing. The ambition of the coalition is to deliver the Draghi reforms. Europe will not have a second chance. This time, missing the opportunity will mean giving up on Europe, and on future generations of Europeans.
Please note that this is a closed-door event, participation is by invitation only.