EU business proposals to lead the global innovation race

- 30 concrete policy proposals for the new EU political cycle -

Today, BusinessEurope published its new position paper on “Research and Innovation in the New European Cycle”, defining our key business priorities. The paper presents 30 concrete policy measures, based on input from the national business associations and a survey among 133 companies of all sizes in Europe.

Key findings are:  

• The global innovation race intensifies. Our figures show that nine out of ten companies plan to increase their research, development and innovation (RDI) investments in the EU over the next five years. Likewise, a similar share of companies plans to increase investment outside of Europe.

• To further strengthen the EU’s innovation power, Europe needs to move forward in the following four priority fields: i) more and smart public investments (e.g. at least €120 billion for Horizon Europe, time to grant <50 days instead of 192); ii) “fit-for-innovation” regulations (e.g. experimentation frameworks to test innovations in a real-world environment); iii) skilled people (e.g. more industrial PhDs); iv) enhanced collaboration (e.g. innovation clusters between business, academia and research organisations).

BusinessEurope Director General Markus J. Beyrer said: “European companies are at the technological forefront in several strategic industrial sectors, but at a global level we are at much higher speed to invent and bring to the market new solutions today than just a few years ago. The global innovation race intensifies, this is why Europe needs to scale up its innovation policy in the next five years. Based on our extensive consultation of BusinessEurope’s membership and a corporate survey, today we propose 30 policy recommendations for the new EU political cycle. We are confident that these recommendations would make Europe even more attractive for private investments in research and innovation."

See the position paper and the 30 policy recommendations here.