New ICT sectors: Platforms for European growth?

Europe's failure to specialise in new ICT sectors and firms is likely to hold back Europe’s post-crisis recovery. Europe lacks in particular leading

Publishing date: 28 August 2012
Authors: Reinhilde Veugelers

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Europe's failure to specialise in new ICT sectors and firms is likely to hold back Europe’s post-crisis recovery. Europe lacks in particular leading platform providers, who are capturing most of the value in the new ICT ecosystem.

• In-depth analysis of some specific new emerging ICT sectors shows that the problem in Europe appears not to be so much in the generation of new ideas, but rather in bringing ideas successfully to market. Among the barriers are the lack of a single digital market, fragmented intellectual property regimes, lack of an entrepreneurial culture, limited access to risk capital and an absence of ICT clusters.

• The EU policy framework, particularly the Innovation Union and Digital Agenda EU 2020 Flagships, could better leverage the growth power for Europe of new ICT markets.

The emphasis should move beyond providing support for infrastructure and research, to funding programmes for pre-commercial projects. But perhaps most important is dealing with the fragmentation in European digital markets.

About the authors

Reinhilde Veugelers

Prof Dr. Reinhilde Veugelers is a full professor at KULeuven (BE) at the Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation. She has been a Senior fellow at Bruegel since 2009. She is also a CEPR Research Fellow, a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and of the Academia Europeana. From 2004-2008, she was on academic leave, as advisor at the European Commission (BEPA Bureau of European Policy Analysis). She served on the ERC Scientific Council from 2012-2018 and on the RISE Expert Group advising the commissioner for Research. She is a member of VARIO, the expert group advising the Flemish minister for Innovation. She is currently a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of the journal Science and a co-PI on the Science of Science Funding Initiative at NBER.

With her research concentrated in the fields of industrial organisation, international economics and strategy, innovation and science, she has authored numerous well cited publications in leading international journals. Specific recent topics include novelty in technology development, international technology transfers through MNEs, global innovation value chains, young innovative companies, innovation for climate change, industry science links and their impact on firm’s innovative productivity, evaluation of research & innovation policy, explaining scientific productivity, researchers’ international mobility, novel scientific research.

Websites:
https://feb.kuleuven.be/reinhilde.veugelers
https://bruegel.org/author/reinhilde-veugelers/