What am I trying to achieve here?
Helping innovators find a way out of the polycrisis
Innovation can lead us out of the polycrisis
Like the rest of the world, the European Union is facing the polycrisis (1, 2, 3).
Different ideas are emerging on how to tackle the crirs. They range from de-growth, to autarky, to collectively burying our heads in the sand.
Throughout history, similar crises have been mitigated or averted through paradigm-shifting innovations, often knowledge- and technology-driven. They turned seemingly insurmountable problems into Malthuseian fallacies.
Maximising the likelihood of such paradigm shifts occurring is Europe’s best chance out of the polycrisis.
The private sector should be front and centre in producing paradigm-shifting innovation
Innovation is permitted (or blocked) by politics, policies and polities. But it is brought into being by individuals and enterprises.
If there is a market for innovation, and a compelling case for returns, innovators will take a risk and try to innovate.
If the risk pays off, innovators grow rich, populations reap the benefits, and crises become fallacies. This cycle accelerates: creating more resources for research, more breakthroughs, more growth, more benefits for society, and fewer, shorter, shallower crises.
But since the 1970s, innovation has stagnated, especially in Europe
Some argue that since the 1970s, we have been living through a Great Stagnation; that rates of innovation, technological progress and productivity growth have stalled.
Globally, there are several causes of this stagnation. The EU faces a specific set of drivers. Some are of its own making. All are soluble.
The many factors creating the drag on innovation in the EU include the absence of a real capital markets union , an over-reliance on the precautionary principle, and too much regulation - which makes us less globally competitive and flatlines EU innovation.
The architect of the Great Stagnation hypothesis, Tyler Cowen, argues parts of the world may be coming out of this sclerosis. But in the EU, we see inputs (like spending on R&D) increase more slowly than in China and the US, while the bloc also loses ground to other regions on outputs (like patent generation and high-tech exports).
Compared to the rest of the world, Europe may still be in the midst of a Great Stagnation.
Without change, the EU will depend on others for innovation and, thus, for solving its crises
Humankind can and will innovate out the polycrisis. But if its regulatory environment is unnecessarily restricting innovation, the genesis of such a solution will not happen in the EU.
Europe will depend on others to set the pace and direction of its own recovery. While other countries will export technologies and grow comparatively richer, Europe will import critical dependencies and grow comparatively poorer
What I want to do
Collaborate with companies developing, or seeking to develop, these paradigm-shifting innovations in Europe.
Help them work with policymakers to remove the barriers that have kept EU stagnation persistent and its global share of innovation low.
Enable innovators to reap the rewards of risk taking and spread society-benefiting innovations across the Union and the globe.
Policy areas which will best help maximize the likelihood of crisis-ending innovation:
General Purpose Technologies (GPTs) are technological innovations that enable innovation elsewhere in society. They are breakthroughs that other breakthroughs build upon. They birth products, processes and knowledge that spill over into other applications. In short, they compound innovation.
Getting a handle on GPTs will turbocharge the EU’s rate of innovation, and put the continent on the front foot in the global technological race, reducing dependence on other regions and increasing prosperity.
Many issues blocking the emergence of GPTs fall within national policy competence. Some, such as the capital markets and access to cross-border R&D funding, have a European component. Addressing these could be the enablers Europe needs for a new GPT era.
I would be interested in working with any partners who share this world view, but especially those active in:
Advanced Manufacturing: 3D printing/additive manufacturing, nanotechnology, advanced robotics, advanced and composite materials.
Biotechnology: advanced therapeutics and precision medicines, platform technologies, AI- and quantum-driven medical research; synthetic biology, agri-tech and precision farming.
Data and digital: anything that can turbocharge Europe’s computational capacity (AI, quantum etc).
Energy: especially nuclear technologies and anything more generally that makes energy ‘too cheap to meter’.
Procurement: simplifying and opening up public procurement procedures, especially for start-ups and scale-ups.
R&D policy: simplifying the process for accessing and reporting on EU funding, particularly for start-ups and scale-ups.
Space: including organisations in the geo-strategic, geo-spatial, launch, and industrials domains.
Start-ups and scale-ups: removing barriers to starting-up, scaling-up and investing in high-risk/high-societal-reward ventures (e.g. regulatory simplification, harmonised EU company law, capital markets reform etc).