On Wednesday, the Financial Times had an article on the EU’s proposed “cluster” policy, which is meant to help create a European Silicon Valley.
The article, written by ScienceBusiness Innovation Board members Esko Aho (the director of the Sitra innovation fund and a former Finnish Prime Minister) and Frank Brown (the dean of INSEAD Business School), urges Europe “to focus.”
“[J]ust one US research institution,” Mr. Aho and Mr. Brown write, “the University of California-San Francisco in the Silicon Valley cluster, has spawned publicly traded companies with a combined market value of $90bn (£45bn, €56bn) – three times the value of Europe’s entire biotechnology sector.”
And over in Asia, “China has concentrated resources and tax breaks on three mega-hubs for technological development. Whether by market rule or government fiat, these clusters are big, bold and concentrated.”
Europe’s approach, by contrast, is “small, timid and diffuse,” Mr. Aho and Mr. Brown say. The EU counts some 2,000 clusters, 70 different national cluster policies and hundreds of regional programs.
But we now have a chance to make bold change.
Between 2007 and 2013 the EU has budgeted €308bn ($493bn, £245bn) for structural funds, a type of regional-development “catch-up” funding, of which some can be applied to knowledge networks as easily as to road networks.
This is the time for the EU to direct its funding to the strongest existing clusters. As Mr. Aho and Mr. Brown point out, the EU must be open, encouraging the best people, wherever in the world they may be, to work in Europe’s clusters.
It must also promote competition among universities, com¬panies and regions. It must encourage risk-taking. And, importantly, it must act on empirical analysis, rather than political preference.
We act ACT have been saying this for a long time. As a European who follows EU politics, it seems to me that be it in the area of standards or in the area of patents, decisions in the EU have been made on the basis of political preference and ideology rather than dispassionate, fact-based analysis far too often in recent years.
So, this time around, let’s step back from the politics for a little bit and do some cool-headed analysis of which already existing clusters promise the most success. And then let’s direct funding to those clusters.
We need top universities, research labs, venture capital firms, and young companies all in one place. Only then can we hope to compete with Silicon Valley, which already has all these factors for success and is creating one successful company after the next because of it.