The European Commission’s latest R&D report points to a continued loss of Europe’s relative weight relative to both the US and China. Of the 2,500 companies with the most R&D investment in the world, only 17.6% are located in Europe, while the US has 40% and China 18%. Among the companies studied, Europe accumulates 8.3% of the total investment, the USA 35% and China 29%. Of these companies, only 12 are in Spain.
All this in a context where productivity continues to be one of the great challenges of the Spanish economy. In the last two decades, the growth of Spanish productivity has been only 5%, significantly below that of the reference European economies, which at the same time have had a productivity evolution below 22% of US growth.
At the IESE Healthcare Conferences, we discussed the keys to fostering innovation, which can be summarized in three main ones:
The first is the easiest to diagnose and, in a sense, also to implement: increasing the resources that the public sector allocates to R&D. The latest data from Eurostat indicate that the governments of the European Union budgeted a investment of 244 euros per capita in R&D, while Spain remained at only 152 euros per capita, far behind Germany, which allocates 471 euros, and Denmark, with 530 euros per capita.
The second is to make it easy, creating an environment where talent and companies want to come here. This aspect is much more complex and requires a clear strategic commitment in all areas, creating appropriate legal and fiscal frameworks and thinking about the long term. The new startup law is an important step in the right direction, but innovation goes far beyond startups and still has a long way to go, especially if we look at what other European countries are doing. Italy, for example, has a much more generous tax program to attract research talent and the administrative part in countries like Germany, Denmark or the United Kingdom is much simpler.
The third key is public-private collaboration. Neither the public nor the private sector can create the ecosystem we need alone. It is not enough to mention it from time to time. It must be pushed forward decisively, without misgivings, having a fluid dialogue in order to be able to understand how to make this common goal possible.
Data from the Commission’s report indicate that the global technological race is intensifying in four sectors: health, automotive and information and communication technology production and services. In the last two decades, Europe has gained relative positions in automotive and leads the sector’s global R&D investment. It has also gained positions relative to China in the health sector, although it has lost relative positions to the US. In these two sectors, Catalonia has a privileged position. Now, we just need to know how to take advantage of it.
