Toespraak eurocommissaris Potocnik: ‘Hoe kan Zweeds onderzoek nog beter worden?’
SPEECH/08/125
Janez Potocnik
European Commissioner for Science and Research
How can Europe make Swedish research perform even better?
Address to the Swedish Parliament
Stockholm, 4 March 2008
Mr. Speaker, Honourable Members of Parliament, Ladies and gentlemen,
First of all, my thanks go to the Speaker, Mr. Westerberg, for his invitation to speak today.
Speaking to the Swedish Parliament is a rewarding opportunity for a European Commissioner in charge of research.
Your country is a trend-setter in research and innovation. The latest European Innovation Scoreboard put the Swedish innovation system at the top of the world.
Your country has the highest overall innovation performance and is the "best in class" in knowledge creation. You have reached many years ago what other European countries dream of, reaching and even going beyond the goal of investing 3% of GDP in research.
You have probably understood better than anyone that knowledge is a key factor for sustaining your competitiveness in a global economy, if you don't want to turn to lower wages or poorer social security.
Our future lies in knowledge. Our future depends on our ability to know more and to translate knowledge in products or services that the market or society value.
Our society will be better to live in if we succeed in making the paradigm shift from the post-second-world-war resource-based economy to a knowledge-based society.
This is the programme that the whole of Europe has embarked on and what we like to call in Brussels "the Lisbon strategy".
Creating an innovative, knowledge-based Europe is a complex undertaking. We need to take action across a whole range of policy areas. We need consistency and coherence.
We need to press ahead with investing in people, modernising labour markets, while unlocking the business potential of our SMEs and investing more in research and education. We need to look at flexicurity, child care, life-long learning, reducing red tape and modernising public administration, at the same time as increasing the mobility and career prospects of researchers.
Strengthening competition in the services sector is as much part of innovation policy as pushing ahead with a new generation of research infrastructures.
All these aspects matter. Each element reinforces the others, while a lack of progress in one area holds back progress in the others.
Innovation policy presents quite a challenge to policy-makers. It requires policy-makers and politicians to innovate in the way they conduct and implement policy.
Looking at international rankings, which consistently put your country at the top, it seems that Sweden knows how to do all this.
So what can I contribute to your debate today? My message is that even for a highly successful country like Sweden, Europe matters. The Europe of knowledge - the Europe of research, innovation and education - matters a lot.
Europe matters, because the world is becoming flat, to borrow the title of Thomas Friedman's bestseller. Others say the world is increasingly spiky. But what is clear is that Europe is not the only one realising the importance of investing in knowledge.
South Korea recorded R&D investment levels of 2.9 % of GDP in 2005. For comparison, I remind you of the EU's R&D level in 2005: 1.85 %.
If current trends persist, China will invest as much of its GDP in research as Europe does by next year.
If you allow me to borrow from Richard Lester, a professor at MIT, we clearly see that competition is happening between people, companies and places. People and companies are increasingly mobile - places are not. The real competition is occurring between places.
A policy brief from the Brussels-based Bruegel think tank argues that Swedish and US R&D intensity is higher than these countries' industrial structures would suggest. This implies that particular factors are at work in Sweden, such as a large integrated technology market and a superior academic research environment.
Sweden has many assets to deploy in this global competition. But the point I would like to debate is how Europe is helping Sweden to strengthen its assets and to be a big player in this world. And, more importantly, how Europe could help Sweden even more.
I will assert, for example, that the European single market is of vital importance for Sweden. Attracting private sector investment is a big challenge for Europe - Sweden has the challenge of sustaining the high level of private sector R&D investment it has recorded over the last few years. Access to a large, innovation-friendly market is one of the answers to that challenge.
We have to understand what is driving corporate R&D investment. The driving force is a reasonable perspective of a return on investment. If a company believes it has access to a large, innovation-friendly market giving it a chance of recouping R&D investments, it will invest. It would be stupid not to.
There is much work still ahead of us in order to realise a true single market conducive to innovation. It suffices to mention fragmented financial services markets or different technologies or the existence of diverging product and service standards across national markets. But it is the Commission's strong ambition, in partnership with the Member States, to create a large European domestic market that rewards innovative, risk-taking companies.
But there is more than access to markets. Increasingly, companies operate in an era of open innovation. They have to tap into the talent, the science and the frontier knowledge developed by universities and research centres. No company can afford any more to run a closed R&D shop.
A world-class public research base is a vital condition for fostering a vibrant knowledge economy. Also on that account, Sweden has an excellent track record. And Europe is helping it to become even better; the European dimension offers Sweden economies of scale and scope that it would never have on its own. The European Research Area fosters scientific excellence through competition between researchers on a continental scale. The European Research Council is the clearest and to date most radical expression of this European competition for excellence; it is a new body run by scientists funding investigator-driven frontier research on the sole criterion of scientific excellence. The Swedish government has always been a strong ally for the creation of this European variation of the US National Science Foundation.
But the European Research Area also allows a critical mass of researchers, from companies and from universities across Europe and beyond, to cooperate in addressing complex scientific or technological challenges. We have recently launched a new form of ambitious public - private partnerships. These Joint Technology Initiatives (as we call them in our jargon) are the most recent expression of Europe's ambition to benefit from scientific cooperation at continental scale. For example, a new public - private partnership with a budget of € 1.6 billion has just been launched to develop Europe's next generation of green aircraft. It has Swedish companies and researchers among its core partners.
I have already said we have a lot of work ahead of us in order to realise a single European market. We have even more work to do to create a truly single market for research, for researchers and for technology.
Our public research base in Europe is characterised by fragmentation and duplication of efforts. Many governments or national bodies fund the same type of research without knowing about each other. Many researchers and universities compete for funding, if they compete at all, in small and sub-optimal research systems. There is great potential for obtaining better scientific value for research money by introducing more openness and coherence in Europe's fragmented research landscape.
Last year, with the publication of a Green Paper, we launched a wide debate on the future of the European Research Area. The essential question is this one: what should we do to ensure that Europe helps each national or regional research system to participate in and benefit from the rapidly advancing global science and technology enterprise?
How should we work together so that our public research base - an essential factor of our competitiveness and prosperity - remains on the global map of science of tomorrow?
I was very encouraged by the numerous responses to the public consultation and the large mobilisation of researchers, including in Sweden. We have carefully studied the contributions from this Riksdag (Swedish Parliament) and from the Swedish government.
We obviously take to heart your arguments on the central role of industry in the knowledge-based economy. We appreciate your emphasis on the vital link between research, education and innovation. And we share your concern to carefully balance the benefits of coordination with a healthy level of diversity and competition.
There is a unique Swedish word that encapsulates so well what we would like to see happening more in European research, namely "samordning" (putting order together).
We believe the core premise of a successful European Research Area is a process of smart specialisation. By this, I obviously do not mean a form of coercive, central planning, dictated by enlightened bureaucrats in Brussels. I do mean a process of samordning, a dynamic of voluntary coordination between equals, creating conditions so that over time a pattern of specialised clusters emerge. I picture these clusters as having recognised and recognisable excellence at world level. As a result, they will exert what economists call "agglomeration effects"; the best want to be where the best are.
The question is: how can we get there? My answer is joint programming. All Member States programme public research in one way or another. Let's create a framework where this programming can be done more jointly at a European level, instead of each one in isolation.
We can learn here from the dynamics that were created by European technology platforms. These allow industry to bring many stakeholders together in order to build a long term vision for their sector and translate that vision into a strategic research agenda. Such a common research agenda brings companies and researchers to work in the direction of a shared goal, without any form of coercion or control.
What I would like to propose later this year is a process of joint programming which brings Member States to work together in the same spirit. I would envisage Member States defining common European reference frameworks which help them to programme their research to achieve European coherence. In other words, a European reference framework, against which each country or region can decide where it wants to put its emphasis and build its strength. Duplication of efforts by different Member States can continue, but we can expect that it would be a conscious, intelligent duplication.
We have acquired many experiences of cross-border coordination of national or regional research programmes. For example, through so-called ERANET projects, we support national programme administrators to pool their resources on particular topics. Based on a particular provision in the European Treaty (article 169), we are providing a financial top-up to integrating national programmes in fields like support to high-growth SMEs or ambient assisted living for ageing people.
But it is fair to say that these experiences, however valuable, have so far been of a rather ad-hoc nature. The proposals we will publish later this year will aim at making joint programming more strategic, more structured and better governed politically, with a clear steering role for national ministers through the Competitiveness Council of ministers.
I don't believe this would make sense on all subjects under the sun, but it would make a lot of sense to programme research jointly in response to a very limited number of important societal challenges.
The Strategic Energy Technology plan, which the European Commission has recently proposed, is a good case in point. This SET plan proposes a strategy for Europe, or at least those countries willing, to invest and work collectively with the aim of developing and facilitating market take-up of cutting edge low carbon energy technologies. The ultimate aim is to deliver on our ambitious energy and climate change objectives.
Many other subjects could be contemplated in the same spirit, but there are also other forms of joint programming. For example, pooling investments for pan-European research infrastructures, as we are proposing to do via the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures, is another form of "joint programming" of national and regional research in view of European goals of common interest.
In each case, joint programming should lead to more cooperation and more competition; cooperation among public funders of research, thus making Europe stronger as a whole, and more competition among researchers, thus ensuring higher returns in scientific excellence. Scientific excellence should always be the underlying principle and objective in everything we do.
I personally believe a well understood and open process of joint programming, leading to smart specialisation, can bring a lasting, positive change for research in Europe. But success depends on a number of conditions.
First and foremost, it requires a seamless mobility of researchers, who should easily be able to move to where their science is happening. Secondly, it requires higher levels of knowledge sharing across sectors, across disciplines, across borders. And thirdly, it requires a modernisation agenda with a European focus for our universities.
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Ladies and gentlemen,
European and Swedish research and innovation are not locked in a zero-sum game. I strongly believe they are engaged in a win-win situation.
There is a comprehensive set of actions that we can and should take to build a European Research Area that maximises benefits for all.
These actions are within our reach. At the end of next week, European leaders will gather in Brussels for their spring economic summit and they will discuss the European Commission's proposals for the next cycle of the Lisbon strategy.
I have strong hopes that our leaders, with the support of this Parliament, will endorse our call to realise Europe's fifth freedom, the freedom of movement of knowledge: a seamless mobility of researchers, a smooth transfer of knowledge, and easy cooperation between businesses and universities across Europe.
In a bit more than a year, Sweden will have the opportunity to take Europe's research and innovation agenda forward, when it will take on the presidency of the EU. Sweden will be ideally placed to advance discussions on many key subjects in this regard.
One is the debate on the governance of the European Research Area: what do Member States expect from this ERA and how do they work together to make it happen for mutual benefit? Another one, closely linked, is the debate on the review of the European Union budget. This debate will probably be less about budgetary figures and more about what we expect from Europe and its budget in the future.
Judging from Sweden's exemplary record in research and innovation, I am confident of the direction in which your government, with the support of this Parliament, will be steering these debates.
As Malcolm X said: "The future belongs to those who prepare for it today." It could not apply better to the task we have at hand to create a knowledge-based Europe that helps to sustain prosperity for the highest number of people in Europe, and in the world at large.
Thank you for your attention.