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Lets focus on the bigger picture here.

Developing our knowledge and then putting it to good use gives us the potential for securing a competitive position- that goes without saying, perhaps.

Living in Europe offers us enormous history, diversity and a constant respect for the make-up of its different cultures.

Europe is a very proud continent forged from this history of competitiveness but it is grappling with its place in the global world where others seem to have a greater present-day advantage.

For many, Europe seems stalled; in jobs, growth and its future space, it seems not so sure on what and where it can effectively compete in a complex and challenging world. There are so many competing voices within, draining vital energy, while others outside Europe are getting on with the job of equipping themselves for the changes taking place to effectively compete in today’s world.

The forging of the European Union needs more ‘heat’ to meld into the force that many want, yet every time it seems to be getting to that required temperature for effecting a real change, someone or something comes along and throws ‘cold water’ on it.

“Herding cats”

Perhaps that idiomatic saying of “herding cats” summarizes many of the discussions and debates that often occur all over Europe, offering up their part of the solution to what seems to me, increasingly an intractable problem. There is this ongoing attempt to control or organize what seems intent on staying uncontrollable or chaotic.

It just seems incredibly difficult to get the required direction or united determination to channel ‘our’ energies, perhaps impossible is a growing feeling that is fuelling even more the nationalistic pride built from centuries of disputes and disagreements in alternating alliances of the day.

Europe in whatever eventual union or collection of entities needs to stop focusing inward as that seems simply not to help. It needs to look outward and recognize the challenges it needs to go after and organize around, that shift the ground it competes on, so it can offer the foundations to build from for many of these individual voices to unite to move all those concerns that need clarity, work and a sense of clear direction. We are focusing on the right aspects to unite behind, to identify with and combine our unique resources.

At present we are all pulling in our own directions, to secure our own piece of the declining economic pie and that is undermining any ability for improved performance.

“Fiddling while Rome burns”

You do get this sense we enjoy “crisis and opportunity”. The institutions and bodies that are set up to lay out the broad direction within the EU, start with good intention and then occupy themselves with a host of unimportant or less important matters and neglect priorities during a crisis. They get lost in the details, determined to defend and spend the budgets and lose sight of the need for clear commercial or social outcomes.

The source of this “fiddling while Rome burns” is the story that Nero played the fiddle (violin) while Rome burned, during the great fire in AD 64. The flaw in this was there was no such instrument as the fiddle (violin) invented in first-century Rome. Equally the events of a fire have been constructed in all the rivalries and conflicting accounts that came after. I get a sense of this today within the EU, we are failing to orchestrate even the violin player, everyone is playing their own tune!

Europe stands at a real crossroads today, where it travels determines its future

It can stay locked up in conflicts, often chaotic decision-making, in its many disputes and simmering rivalries or it can learn from those events across its history and find a different path.

I doubt that path is integration of countries, even freedom of movement or common currencies or a given language. These are ideals suffering from imposition yet we can integrate and combine in ways that allow us as individuals to prosper and grow but also to unite in projects and across challenges that deliver a more promising future.

Grand challenges we can unite behind.
These come from the challenges that should be of the uttermost importance to our future well-being:
1. The long drawn out integrating the digital infrastructure across Europe to bring down the present barriers and allow less of a divide across Europe.
2. The ability to connect across a European energy grid that delivers on security, and is moving purposefully towards clean and efficient alternatives that are economically viable alternatives.
3. The formation of a scientific research community
4. The harmonization of intellectual property to accelerate invention not just protect it
5. The overhaul to our educational system to deliver the required skills we need for the future not based on the past.
6. Putting in place the roadmap to renewables that give investment confidence
7. Adding even more momentum towards key-enabling technologies
8. Having a reusable framework that reduces the ‘throw-away’ culture and mind-set
9. Tackle health and wellbeing in clear, coordinated and integrated ways across all.
10. Redoubling the efforts on food security, sustainable agriculture and land and sea management through a greater agricultural revolution.

I could add a few more but these are all ‘big bites’. We should possible go back to the approach to EU flagship programmes where the big agenda gets the required focus from politicians, bureaucrats, business and our institutions, at every level and engaging in meaningful ways with our broader society, then we are achieving more in ‘common cause’ and integration than where we have been heading recently.

We should push the EU agenda towards delivering integrated models to offer new value and opportunities, the innovation part, as central to achieving the need for new growth and jobs.

These big challenges give us our future, they break down the barriers, they open up our minds to what is the real borders to protect, to push out towards in different ways If we can unlock the barriers and ring-fencing on many of these that are the blocks today, we are laying in the foundation for growth and jobs.

There is nothing new in this appeal but the speed of change occurring outside Europe requires us to shift internal disputes and channel this energy into resolving the big challenges.

Europe needs to shoot for a different moon.

Structural issues are longstanding, we are attempting to protect far too much, we are falling to move towards a ‘creative destruction’ where innovation-lead solutions provide the better alternative in growth and challenge We link to these common causes as they benefit the individual, as well as the communities we are in (national, local, scientific, educational etc).

The push for a common market of ideas and knowledge that are allowed to flow

I detect some positive movement in seizing some of these outstanding big challenges in the way the European Commission is being set up and structured. The new commission structure is pointing to big issues; it is veering away from past integration mantras, wanting to deliver on some of these challenges suggested above.

I just hope it does not extend the list too much or we go down the path of dilution, spreading and stretching our capabilities and resources too thin and ending up with the usual past compromises, all wrought out in eleventh hour late-night deals. Of course this is perhaps wishful thinking and certainly early days.

Can we move out of our fiscal consolidation mind-set? We must

As we continue to have fiscal consolidation, we get rising Euroscepticism. We nibble away not so much at the edges we are actually attacking our core and this is where we are facing the defence of knowledge assets and finding ways to promote by, perhaps, uniting behind our bigger EU challenges.

So where does innovation fit, I’d say front and centre. Every conversation in every boardroom, in every political meeting, at each EU summit and discussion, it is the outcomes we await to hear. These need to be far more centred around innovation in the outcome, not just in nice declarations with little behind them but in cohesive plans that move us towards this agenda of tackling the ‘Big Challenge Agenda’

Scaling and building innovation waves

We need to scale and create the positive waves through innovation. Reality is not in what is going on inside Europe, it is what is happening elsewhere. It is the organization of those knowledge assets to scale and develop the waves of innovation that Asia and America are clustering around in better ways than in Europe.

These can be seen in numerous ways as geographical regions all look for ways to become the dominant force for innovation. Asia, especially China is testing that existing dominance and Europe and others in the West need to embrace that challenge, not attempt to defend against it in legislative efforts but in this necessary knowledge asset re-equipping.

Keeping innovation high on the EU agenda but in new bigger ways
Innovation features higher in national policy than ever before in many parts of the world. Let us all hope Europe does not drop the innovation ball, but cutting its commitments to what has already been hard-fought over, delivered in the Horizon 2020 programme.

Equally let’s not dilute its effort and whittle away its value in thousands of small, perhaps meaningless gestures built on political threat and fragmented thinking.

Getting Europe moving again will need a much bolder vision and then stay focused on funding it if it links into these grand challenges in clear or valuable (experimental) ways that can be a catalyst for others to pick up and run with over the next mile, as innovation is not a sprint, it is a marathon to run, at this big challenge level.

Who is that knocking on my door?
* China has set itself some ambitious innovation targets, in its production of patents, in producing more PhD’s in science and engineering than US institutions or European ones and twice as many undergraduates in these fields than the US.
* China is going about outpacing the US in investments in research and development, it is growing R&D expenditure by 15 to 20% per year, not just to catch up but to drive innovation into its future.
* Asia and America invest more than Europe in R&D at the ratio of 3:3:2. The technology-intensive activity in the Asian region is fast approaching that of North America and Western Europe.
* China’s invention initiatives are producing rapid results as the government seeks increasing actively in cooperation’s with its Asian competitors. Asian countries are mutually fuelling one another’s innovative success
* The precise impact of Asia’s IP expansion is impossible to predict. But its transformative potential is obvious as the commissioners of the patent offices of Japan, South Korea, China and, to a lesser extent, Singapore and Taiwan meet increasingly to define and coordinate their intellectual property (IP) policies although a number of territorial disputes and political divides do often get in the way.

Each of these examples is building future knowledge assets to unlock innovation potential.

* America equally continues to work through a clearer innovation framework than I feel we in Europe seem not to have, or it seems incapable of delivering in our current fragmented view of innovation understanding. We want to spread innovation either too thinly or distort its value and meaning. We need a clear overarching innovation message.
* Take the reports from the “NII Innovate America Council on Competitiveness” or the White House view on “A Strategy for American Innovation” as debate documents or guidance indicators that offer an overarching view of how innovation needs to work and on what is needed to achieve and maintain a competitive position for America, written by both Business leaders and Government officials.

So what’s next?
The European Union has consistently failed to exploit its potential for innovation-based growth. Europe remains less inter-connected in critical areas due to political grandstanding and catering to vested domestic interests.

Does Europe lack the capacity for change as we constantly fail to convert much that seems promising, we are often not commercializing on all our hard work? Others pick up the baton and make the ‘risk’ investments off of the work and initial investments in Europe.

We constantly get caught up in the politics of the day, that seem to continue to divide and rule in old fashion ways, yet technology, science, and innovation are moving at a force and speed we are often guilty of not appreciating its impact or wealth-creating prospective. Innovation does not respect borders, it seamlessly moves across them but we need to forge the infrastructure to allow it to flow in more efficient and effective ways.

It is high time we did understand the real value of innovation, it ‘touches’ us all, we can all ‘feed off it’. We need to mobile around innovation and find the right ways to release our knowledge assets that are residing across Europe in a myriad of guises, waiting for the organizing forces and challenges to unite behind and solve.

We have the latent capability clearly.

**Note : A really useful source of knowledge is this overview of the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators 2014 highlights some major developments in international and U.S. science and engineering (S&E) that explores many useful indicators in the race of Science, Research and Technology. It’s worth a read.

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Braden is the author of “Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire” from John Wiley & Sons and is also the editor of Blogging Innovation (http://bit.ly/d2c9aW ).
Braden picked up on an article lamenting the seemingly poor state of Canada’s innovation efforts (http://bit.ly/fdLeI5 ) with the view that “Innovation is literally hitting a wall”.

Braden has also commented about the recent US approach to resolving their innovation approach and believes it is limited in its understanding and appreciation of innovation.

Here in Europe we are certainly going through the same crisis of confidence with innovation, it is not producing the wealth and growth expected and needed to fuel our economies.

The EU commissioner for innovation, Máire Geoghegan- Quinn, the EU’s first innovation commissioner, has started to created a lot of positive energy around some exciting new initiatives but are they enough? My answer is simply no.

For a very thoughtful article on the EU and innovation (http://bit.ly/hCZWdO ) published in www.innovationmanagement.se by Ann Mettler, Executive Director of think tank The Lisbon Council and here she gives her take on policy and innovation.
Ann Mettler comments “One needs to distinguish between policy levers and policy drivers such as competition. It is about levers versus drivers. One key here is to look at the money and how the EU chooses to spend. Current spending priorities are the antithesis of innovation. If we continue to spend the largest proportion of the budget on the common agricultural policy we cannot with a straight face claim to prioritise innovation”.

Braden states the same within the article he was picking up upon, written  by University of British Columbia economics professor James Brander. (http://bit.ly/fdLeI5) that explores this sobering possibility of “hitting a brick wall” in a new study published in the Canadian Journal of Economics.

Branden concludes that the pace of innovation is slowing dramatically in four key areas: agriculture, energy, transportation and health care. The consequences could have a profound impact on our lives if these are slowing down. Others will pick up any slack.

For me reading about Europe and its innovation policies it does seem Europe faces an “innovation emergency” because its businesses are falling behind its US and Japanese and now China as rivals in terms of investment and new patents, graduates and investment start ups. We are facing many challenges that seemingly the Commission cannot get the necessary momentum behind to reverse some frightening trends and quess what, the developing world is rapidly catching up.

A good understanding of the policies emerging from the approaches to be taken for EU innovation can be read here (http://bit.ly/gFZ6EF ) in a series of interviews written by Haydn Shaughnessy.

So I do agree, we are actually in crisis. I also agree we really do need a new era of innovation as the old one has clearly not worked. It has to be bolder, more radical and more reflective of what innovation is providing for us.

The realization is innovation cannot be contained within borders, it needs to be encouraged wherever it goes, and the Governments need to work on ensuring they keep a stake in it. Presently this is not as good a stake as we need for the level of growth, jobs and economic prosperity.

Innovation policymakers need a better understanding of innovations parts.

• Any innovation policy is a formidable task, innovation by its nature and understanding is very broad. How can policy guide and stimulate innovation differently?
• Braden is right in his article, the heavy emphasis on applied science and investments in research and technology as the keys to innovation is not the complete answer but it is part of it, of course.
• Increasingly within the EU there is a growing realisation that all this research effort that is being heavily supported through grants and funding is falling very short in the commercialisation of inventions. There is a shift to measuring impact on society, in the delivery of benefits and that is important.
• There is an increased realization on bringing new services and products to market and this comes through the SME. This is where it becomes harder to administer and develop levers for the SME to thrive. Often the argument for Governments is to simply get out of the way and let the market manage this. In the EU, the dispersion of grants or funds will still have bureaucratic strings attached to it, so this is unlikely to happen.

The new recent US & EU initiatives on innovation
With the announcement of new initiatives on both sides of the pond I still get the distinct impression the policymakers are simply re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic- to do something that will soon be overtaken by events, or that contributes nothing better to the existing solutions to our current problems and that is a worry.

We do need something more radical. Policy needs to be bolder. We simply don’t need just another Sputnik moment, a realization others are beating us, we need to put that man on the moon to make sure we mobilize society around innovation.

The real challenges needed to be faced.

• The first big challenge to innovation is really a management challenge, not a research challenge, and it is not clear how the latest policies will succeed on this front. We do need to recognize managing innovation is rapidly changing the way we need to work. Is this being fully accounted for within new policies or pushed more? Remaking management to innovate is essential to deliver through.
• Innovation has fragmented; today’s ‘innovation’ means what? We do need to understand the different ‘types’ of innovation needed to perform the specific task. I am not sure the policymakers understand the really important differences between open innovation, needs-based innovation, service-dominant innovation or where Business model innovation fits for support or development to name a few. This needs to change by rethinking innovation. Break it down more. It is not an internal event; it is an external collaborative event beyond a few PhD scientists to deliver innovation. Innovation needs to engage society more, not at the end but throughout the whole innovation development process.
• There is a greater emphasis on innovation partnerships as innovation comes about at the intersection of different disciplines and relationships, so this is very positive. Bringing a diversity of people and what they can contribute together is positive. I’m not sure yet if this will be understood enough this includes the final consumer with this.
• 70% or more of GDP comes from services. Many service areas don’t depend on research; they rely on ‘gut feeling’ instinct and quickly spotting ‘breaking’ opportunities, they utilise and combine knowledge more than product alone. Speed to market or first mover advantage can be much more important and how do you account for this in policy? We need to find better ways; we need to push more of the levers that help in this. We need to develop more knowledge platforms that combine knowledge to make better intelligent products.
• I do share this opinion expressed by Ann that there is still just too close a relationship and political patronage of certain sectors that are leading to a kind of inbred relationship between government and companies, leading to lagging performance in terms of international competitiveness and protective positions that are not actually creating new jobs,  they are simply sending jobs away.
• US economist Tyler Cowen argues, there are huge economic implications if innovation stagnates. This is what lies behind what he calls The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better. What underpinned the great postwar boom was the industrialisation of inventions made between 1910 and 1940. The goods that poured out of the west’s factories between 1950 and 1975 provided employment and rising real wages for the mass of the US’s and Europe’s citizens. But the “low-hanging fruit” that delivered such benefits is disappearing, he argues.

So are we actually stagnating? So perhaps the era of current innovation activity is over. We are clear of the importance of innovation as a driver of growth and the imperative to exploit it. Perhaps if Innovation was left to look after itself a little more, it could really flourish and provide real breakthroughs that did alter our lives as in the 20^th century very radically, that seemed unfettered far more.

I very much liked Ann Metters’s final comment in her article. “The biggest problem, however, is that we don’t appear to respect the process of innovation itself in the EU. Innovation is not unidirectional. It does not lead to success nine times out of ten. It is by nature experimental, disruptive and unpredictable. We have no formula for it. We can’t control it top down.

And that’s hard to accept, particularly if a lot of money and institutional reputations are at stake. So we create our formulas around R&D, shy away from risk and expect success. But it really doesn’t work that way”

So for me, the battle of ecosystems becomes the necessary innovation platform.
Great advances do exist and many are still out there hanging on the tree. We do need to get past the low hanging fruit but to do this we do need our institutions to step back and provide a new ‘enabling’ infrastructure, we need to build the scaffolding to pick this new economic fruit.

Government need to stick more to their basic knitting, focusing upon developing the conditions for building the ecosystem in which innovation, experimentation and investment can really flourish. We need supportive innovative management or investment ecology not micro-management through administrating funds.

If we want to step up the pace of invention, there has to be a huge shift in the way we think and who does what. We are all presently trying to do each other jobs, often we are falling over each other, we duplicate effort, dilute innovation competition by accepting incremental innovation as the end result.

We can’t continue that way, we all need to be bolder, to realize we are in crisis and where bolder innovation (and invention) can provide solutions.

The government needs to design markets and build institutions that promote innovation and let the markets build their individual ecosystem on which innovation, experimentation and investment come together on platforms that provide broad benefit to all that participate.

Let the market fund these, let Government encourage the enabling platforms, the brokerage to bring these together and ensure it anchors part of that for its society.

Are ecosystems and platforms the global answer to innovation acceleration? I think the more the Governments promote innovation platforms, and provide the levers, infrastructures and technical backbone to allow this to happen, the better.

I think we can see rapid acceleration of ecosystems and then innovation by encouraging these platforms and new business models that can dramatically transform many industries.

Scale and scope will be seen differently, these are global, not country-specific. Individual Governments need to help to build the global cake and ensure they get a slice of it.

It will often be messy, unclear and not as well defined as policymakers would like but that is the nature of innovation.

Focusing more on building different ecosystems becomes mainstream for innovation delivery and we usher in a new era of global innovation. We need to move beyond today’s innovation thinking so a new era of global innovation can emerge.

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