Espoo: The Finnish technology campus north-west of Helsinki has produced a reliable supply of research spin-outs and an equally reliable complaint from their founders, which is that the second year is harder than the first. Laboratory results attract national grants without much difficulty. Turning those results into a company that sells across twenty-seven jurisdictions, with twenty-seven approaches to licensing, procurement and regulatory approval, is where the attrition happens, and it is usually American or Asian capital that picks up the survivors.
On 9 September the European Commission put forward a European Innovation Act aimed squarely at that second year. The proposal is not a funding programme, which is both its principal weakness and the point of it. Instead of adding money to a landscape that already contains Horizon Europe, the European Innovation Council and a thicket of national instruments, it tries to remove the friction that makes European money less useful than its headline totals suggest.
Three mechanisms carry most of the weight. The first is regulatory: the Act would push member states towards common approaches to sandboxes and testing environments, so that a company permitted to trial a product in one country does not begin from zero in the next. The second concerns intellectual property, and it is the most novel element. The proposal envisages a shared European framework for valuing intellectual property, paired with a digital marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of patents and licences, plus advisory support for firms attempting to convert a portfolio into revenue. European universities and research institutes hold a substantial stock of unexploited rights, and the absence of any orderly way to price them has been a standing observation in competitiveness reviews for years.
The third strand is financial, though indirectly so. By harmonising the conditions under which innovative firms raise capital and operate across borders, the Commission hopes to make European companies legible to investors who currently prefer not to read twenty-seven sets of accounts.
The Act arrives inside a dense policy frame. It is presented as an instrument of the Startup and Scaleup Strategy and of the Competitiveness Compass, and it anticipates a European Research Area Act that the Commission still intends to bring forward. That companion measure is expected to address the upstream side of the same problem, including national commitments towards the long-unmet target of spending three per cent of gross domestic product on research and development, and the conditions for researchers moving between institutions, countries and sectors.
Researchers’ organisations have been watching the sequencing with some anxiety. A joint stakeholder statement coordinated through Eurodoc earlier this year argued that a research area built around industrial payoff risks squeezing the bottom-up, excellence-driven funding represented by the European Research Council and the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions. The Innovation Act does nothing to resolve that tension, since it operates entirely downstream of the grant, but its framing, which speaks of converting scientific excellence into industrial leadership, is exactly the framing those organisations were objecting to.
The proposal now goes to the Parliament and the Council, and the intellectual property marketplace is likely to attract the closest scrutiny. A Union-level valuation framework touches national patent offices, tax authorities and accounting standards simultaneously, and none of those constituencies has yet been heard from at length.
