Brussels, December 10, 2018 – Last week Politico organized a panel with the topic “Is Europe a leader in the global race for innovation?”. The event pursued the objective to discuss the opportunities and challenges of the innovation in Europe among European Commissioners and European companies.
Prestigious panelists participated in the event, such as: Ms. Elżbieta Bieńkowska, European Commissioner for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs; Mr. Björn Ekelund, Corporate research director responsible for hardware, antenna and IoT research at Ericsson; Mr. Michael Mandel, Chief Economic Strategist at The Progressive Policy Institute; Mr. Vincent Aussilloux, Director Economics and Finance at France Stratégie; Mr. Nick Vinocur, Technology Editor at Politico. Mr. Ruben Bonet, President and CEO of Fractus, was invited to participate and to give its opinion from the point of view of an innovative European SME.
“SMEs are an important part of the European economy. To date SMEs are not using the patent system to adequately protect their innovations and R&D and this needs to be changed” said Mr. Bonet. “China has been working hard to become an innovation economy and making its patent system world-class to support patents and innovation to the best of their use” said Ruben Bonet.
The World Bank statistics show that on average the European countries invest less than 2% of the Gross Domestic Product on Research and Development per year, whereas China and the U.S. are investing more. “Europe is lagging behind in the scale-up culture compared to the US or China. We need better scale-up initiatives in Europe to meet the gap and to ensure that scale-ups become the norm rather than the exception” said Ruben Bonet. Commissioner Bienkowska wondered why national governments don’t listen to companies regarding the need of creating a real European single market for them to operate.
You can see the full event here © Politico.
Politico is the source for politics and policy in power centers across every continent where access to reliable information, non-partisan journalism and real-time tools creates, informs and engages a global citizenry.
