“Disrupting the future!” Can we in Europe?

The conference “Disrupting the future” organized by the Business Innovation Observatory – a European Commission initiative – aimed to create a fruitful discussion among policy makers, entrepreneurs, start-uppers and other stakeholders of the innovation environment.

It was a great pleasure to participate at the event and present, among others, one of the selected projects (Favour-Excahgne – Part of Mobile Territorial Lab services), which have been evaluated of great innovation potential, out of more than 300 case studies analyzed by the Business Innovation Observatory.

Besides being a good opportunity for networking and to get to know other entrepreneurs, their ideas and most of all exchanging suggestions and thoughts about each other projects; the conference successfully highlighted the limitations/barriers that must be overcome in order to create a competitive innovation environment in Europe.

My take away in one sentence is that we (Europeans) need “education, education & education” and - of course - some adjustment in regulations. Let me explain a bit better every single instance of this wonderful word: “education”.

1. Education (the one which is done in the education system). We need to reform our education system from the ground to the tertiary level. Lucia Cusmano (OECD, Secretary to the Working Party on SMEs and Entrepreneurship) said that Europe is great at attracting talent from all over the world in its universities, but these people once formed often goes and boost innovation somewhere else. Philippe Vanrie (CEO of EBN - European Business and innovation centre Network), said that our university smell like his father (i.e. they are still run as the previous century). I think that we need to educate the next generations in a completely different way for a completely different world with completely new and flexible business models. Moreover, in this kind of society, consciousness and ability in risk evaluation and risk taking will be keys to be able to boost disrupting innovation. Universities and research centers need to change too; research – and founds gathered for it - has not to be an end in itself, but projects should have some real innovation capacity and opportunity to land on the market as some presented that come from that environment - presented both from Cambridge campus related Start-Ups (Cambridge Energy Data Lab – H2GO Power)
2. Education (or better re-education of conspicuous part of the population). Most of today innovations have a digital side. In order to benefit of the last health care monitoring provided by Decadoo (a very interesting case study presented) the users need to understand the basic usage of some devices and be aware of the opportunities/benefits offered by the new technologies. One of the latest documentation about “Citizen and the ICTs” of the statistical public agency of my country (Italy - ISTAT) reports that 4 people out of 10 never used internet in 2014, moreover despite the presence of an incredible amount of online service offered by the public administration only 3 out of 10 used at least one of those. In order to spread innovation, it is crucial to have a well-educated customer base. There are several actions that the policy makers can adopt to gap the digital divide and these could have a double benefit effect: promote the adoption of digital services pushed by start-ups and create an easier/efficient/cost effective paperwork management.
3. Education (financial one). Most of the participants complained about the difficulties of finding resources especially at the starting point of their adventure. Again, this regards risk-taking evaluation by financers but it also regards where the policy makers want to push investments – for instance through taxation. Thus, beside starting to educate average people that the best thing to do with their money/savings is to put it in the national bonds, which may be less taxed than other investments (this is the case of Italy for instance), the concept of crowd-founding and investments that goes to job-creation and ideas/value proposition boosting may be supported as a good way to use citizen investment power.

Besides these important three “education” points of weakness and possible action-points for the policy makers, which may be taken wherever in the world, there is another one only related to the European Union: the single market. Widen the customer base by enabling different countries to use a service/product – without modifications of any type -  is a key factor of success for innovators. Many entrepreneurs complained about different regulation barriers, it was the case of Zoomability (a great example of how entrepreneurs can help people with disability or difficulties in movements). “Less regulation is better regulation” or better a single well done regulation for the 28 countries part of the EU could be a great simplification for entrepreneurs. Europe has already other barriers compared to USA, for instance language and also culture vary a lot more in the old continent in comparison to USA. Finally regulations about financing are also way different state-by-state compared to USA. These barriers represent for sure a limitation when comparing the innovation environment in EU to the USA one.

Here some Tweets from the conference regarding problems and barriers:

“Policy coherence across Europe can improve innovation in Europe”  Ms Cusmano @OECD #BIOfuture

“Single market policy is the best innovation policy” @FabianZuleeg #BIOfuture

Young entrepreneur D. Mata, keynote #BIOfuture event: “Innovation @ institutions relies in creativity encouragement” @EEN_EU @EU_Growth

Do these problems/barriers mean that in Europe we are destined to loose and loose terrain and remain behind our innovators counterparts in USA? No, there are plenty of successful case studies as those presented at the #BIOfuture conference (check the agenda to find the list of the presenters), moreover there are many examples of great disruption such as: Spotify, BlaBlaCar, Skype, Prezi, Eventribe that made their way mainstream from Europe! What does this means? It means that besides the problems and barriers previously explained, innovators developed “antibodies” to fight these problems and got stronger that those who could make it without these problems.

Yes, we (innovators) can disrupt the future and doing it in Europe…we are already doing it, nevertheless a little help from policy-makers that should tackle the listed problems/barriers will represent a giant leap towards success.

Besides the celebration of projects and start-ups analyzed by the Business Innovation Observatory, a lot of stakeholders were on stage not only discussing problems but proposing realizable solutions. Among them, there were not only policy makers or observers, but also representative from tech firms (Ronan Harris, Vice President, Google, EMEA) and business angels (Jacopo Losso, Assistant Director of Secretariat of EBAN - European Business Angels Network). Together with other panelist they gave a clear view on shared recognized problems and the way to find suitable solutions, these need effort but with the commitment of the EU Commission and of every single country a lot can be done.

In its closing remarks, Slawomir Tokarski (Director, DG for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs, European Commission) said that we need changes in policy but everything still depends from talents and skills – these are the only drivers that can boost ideas and thus stimulate financial investments.  A great encouragement, for a mindset change, that should be boost first by every innovator locally.  At the end of his speech he also announce that the work of Business Innovation Observatory will live its 2.0 iteration by continuing to highlight success cases trends and give evidence to policy makers of changes that can boost innovation in Europe. Stay tuned!