‘Science-business gap reason for poor EU performance in technology’

Science|Business news service calls politicians to ‘stop fussing about the spending gap between the EU, US and China and focus instead on the gap between industry and academia’.

Science|Business, an independent news service “reporting on how ideas do, or don’t, get from lab to market”, has published an Innovation Manifesto summarising the main policy changes it believes would make a real difference for European innovation. 

Editor of Science/Business, Richard L. Hudson, argues that politicians need to stop fussing about money spending gap with other countries and, instead focus on the gap “at the root of Europe’s chronic under performance in technology” – the one between science and business. “Into that gap falls the patent that goes unexploited, the research report that gets ignored, or the researcher who leaves for richer labs in San Francisco or Singapore.”

The Innovation Manifesto puts forward nine ideas on how to fill the science-business gap, by changing the legal framework and organisational structure in corporations and in universities: 

• Be Darwinian – concentrate scarce funding on the best research groups and institutions; 
• Reform the technology transfer offices – Set one goal: to make money; 
• Use public funds to encourage seed investing; 
• Fix taxes: encourage private investment;
• Create deeper stock markets for young companies; 
• Harmonise European patent rules, bit by bit; 
• Make patenting cheaper; 
• Provide a better-trained, flexible labour force, and; 
• Drop the barriers that make Europe unattractive.

Science|Business qualifies its manifesto as “an independent, largely liberal-markets view on what is to be done to permit innovation to happen in Europe”.

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