It’s a European habit, to talk a lot and do little. And it’s catching up on the European nations in many ways, particularly in researching and developing new products.
That’s according to a report released late last month that had been commissioned by the European Commission. News accounts say that the group of experts found that European lawmakers tend to chatter a lot about the need to boost research and development to improve Europe's competitiveness. But that’s about as far as they go; they are failing to actually take the necessary action.
The experts were asked to make their report so that Europe could meet one of the objectives of the Lisbon Agenda: to increase R&D investment to 3 percent of the EU economy. That would represent a more than 50 percent increase over the 2004 level. In fact, under current trends even by 2010, the EU isn’t expected to put more than 2.2 percent of its economy into R&D. For Europe to increase its commitment to R&D is an ambitious and worthy goal.
The four experts who made up the group identified several ways the EU could increase R&D investment, but probably none are as important as the implementation of what is being called “a competitive intellectual property regime.”
There is no more powerful incentive to innovate than the enforcement of strong intellectual property rights. There is reluctance among entrepreneurial companies and single entrepreneurs to bring innovative products to market if they don’t trust the state to protect them from pirates and copycats.
Consistency is also important, and that will require the harmonization of 25 different intellectual property structures in Europe. That’s acceptable as long as IP protection is strengthened across the board rather than weakened, which has been the trouble with EU tax harmonization efforts.
The goal of some is to bring all EU nations up to a high level of taxation rather than taking every nation down to, say, Ireland’s low level.
And if those European tax-aucrats succeed in raising taxes while discouraging R&D spending, well, the U.S. will gladly open its arms to even more companies looking for a country that wants to be the innovation leader.