[T]here was a fashion…that industry was finished and now it was services…I’ve always been against it…If there is no more industry, there is no more research. It’s clear. And if there is no more research, its the end. The industry of the future is robotics, its fab labs [fabrication laboratories]…I have always pushed for research that had industrial applications.
Édith Cresson, Historical Archives of the European Union, interview, 6 May 2016, INT989, pp. 28-29.
Summary
The European Policy Analysis Group recently proposed a ‘radical restructuring of the EU ecosystem for innovation’ with an ARPA at the heart of their intervention (report).
I believe the analysis was mistaken. There is merit to a claim that a small number of large and politically-powerful firms held back innovation (my phrasing of the commentary, not that of the authors). But the proposed policy remedy would not fix the problem.*
What the group proposed – directed investment in high-tech – has been tried repeatedly for the past 40 years, certainly with changes in language but not fundamentally in substance. There is no overwhelming evidence that doubling down on it, or shifting budget around, would turn the situation around.
If the authors wished to to sustain their argument that an ARPA investment program was the solution of choice in current conditions, they would need to set it in the history of the many previous European attempts to implement high-tech science and industrial policies – rather than implying that such policies had never before been attempted.
They would no doubt find a lot of comparative material going back to the era of Heinz Riesenhuber.† The argumentation might be interesting, but if the difference was, as I suspect, rather marginal and mainly to do with minor bureaucratic changes, claims of radicalism or outsize impact would be less convincing.
The unlikely conclusion could actually be that Europe had too much of such policy, rather than too little, or perhaps that such policies once worked but are now no longer apt.
I am not going to do the above analysis on behalf of the authors. My point concerns the nature of policy innovation, which is missed because the contemporary policy community retains so little actual historical knowledge of past European S&T policies. Instead, a kind of institutionalized amnesia dominates.
The greatest risk, therefore, is that implementation of repackaged but essentially ineffective S&T policies under newly challenging circumstances would make Europe poorer, not richer.
My alternative approach, building on extensive but seemingly unread analytical work on European competitiveness and productivity (CompNet), shines new light on the evaluation of Horizon Europe and the design of FP10.
CompNet produced a systematic account of what makes Europe competitive. It is by taking such solid data into S&T policy that we can identify fields where science and innovation would be most likely to have detectable effects.
We know that the Heitor group, evaluating Horizon Europe for the European Commission, has also been talking about competitiveness. However, because the group operates in-camera, we do not know what frameworks, if any, it applied to structure its discussion.
Overall, there is an opportunity to open up different perspectives for a new kind of policy more suited to our changing times. This would include emphasis on science and innovation that facilitates trade, supports adaptation to climate change, and interacts with China’s S&T in positive ways that break from the past.
Notes:
*I have no objection to ARPAs. But the remedy, if it exists, probably lies outside the scope of science and innovation policy, such as in the political economy of state aids. In the case of the car industry, cited by the authors, these could logically even extend to the hundreds of trillions of € spent on roads over the past decades (c.f. Sweezy – “automobile-industrial complex”). An unstoppable force of money that would shape every other policy intervention.
†1980s European programs such as ESPRIT (intended to drive competitiveness in the European computer industry) were, at that time, expressly compared to DARPA. A sophisticated discussion about directed high-tech policy emerges within a European context (and that is just one example). SEMATECH – funded by DARPA – serves as another interesting case study, although obviously in that case, an American one.
EU science policy bibliography
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Email: william@resorg.news
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