Webinar on Zoom
Draghi’s view of competitiveness puts innovation – not price cuts via real-exchange-rate depreciation or lower unit costs – at the centre of long-run growth. In today’s geopolitically fragmented economy marked by trade frictions, tariff shocks and strategic decoupling, price-based advantages are fragile and market access can no longer be assumed. This elevates the strategic importance of non-price competitiveness built on frontier research and, crucially, its broad and effective diffusion across sectors. Research and innovation remain the principal engines of productivity.
Against this backdrop, the Draghi report frames Europe’s ‘competitiveness crisis’ fundamentally as an innovation-and-productivity problem. Recent EU assessments (e.g., the Competitive Compass) similarly warn that Europe has not kept pace with other major economies because it struggles to translate ideas into marketable technologies and to embed those technologies across its industrial base.
What drives the EU’s innovation gap? How is this shaping Europe’s competitiveness? To what extent are current EU policies closing it? In this webinar these issues will be discussed along the following lines of inquiry:
- Public R&D governance. To what extent are outcomes weakened by fragmented programmes and weak coordination across EU, national and regional levels? Which instruments best overcome duplication and sub-scale efforts?
- Private R&D and productivity. Is the binding constraint scale (firm size, market depth) or conversion (turning R&D into productivity gains)? What roles do capital markets, tech transfer/IP management, skills, regulation and Single Market fragmentation play?
- Patents and deep tech. How is Europe performing in ICT and deep-tech patenting (including quality and value, not just counts)? What market, regulatory and financial incentives (standardisation, SEP/licensing practices, time-to-grant, enforcement) shape these outcomes?
