In an increasingly challenging geopolitical and economic climate, strengthening Europe’s resilience and protecting its fundamental values and interests, while preserving an open and sustainable economy and enhancing its international leadership and competitiveness is incredibly important. For Europe, it is time to embrace this approach and President Von der Leyen’s upcoming State of the Union speech is an opportunity to signal such a change.
First, it is time to measure success by the effectiveness and impact of policies, not by their number. The EU’s tech policy agenda over the past few years has been guided by overarching public interest objectives shared by the tech industry. However, too often it has been defined by a misconception that regulatory leadership leads to economic leadership, or in other words that “you can regulate yourself to success.” Given the expected significant impact and the extraordinary amount and complexity of many recent EU initiatives, we hope President Von der Leyen uses her address to outline how the government will undertake a deliberate and careful assessment of the full real-life outcomes and impact on competitive conditions of this new body of laws, ensuring key concepts are clear and consistently understood and applied across the bloc through effective governance and enforcement. The launch of such an evaluation and reflection is essential to preserve incentives to invest in innovation in the EU in the future.
Next, it’s time to move away from the instinct to launch initiatives to address any potential risk. Instead, President Von der Leyen should highlight how Europe will prioritise policies that create opportunities and leverage digitalisation to support European start-ups and SMEs, and support initiatives that strengthen the digital skills of the EU’s present and future workforce – particularly in STEM and computer education, including for underrepresented minorities and women – to strengthen the long-term competitiveness of the EU’s technology industry.
Additionally, it’s time to incentivise innovation through a strong, open and attractive single market and promote an internet that is open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and secure. We’re hopeful President Von der Leyen will discuss how she plans to further harmonize the Single Market to preserve this bedrock for Europe’s competitiveness and innovation.
Further, it’s time for the EU to advance its environmental goals without creating unnecessary disruptions for businesses. The tech sector plays a crucial role in promoting global sustainability efforts and in improving the environmental, energy, and performance characteristics of products, services and infrastructure that increasingly rely on digitization. We are an essential partner in the transition to a more sustainable and resilient European economy, and believe that effort will be faster and more successful if Europe’s policymakers fully embrace the need to foster an enabling environment for innovation. We urge President Von der Leyen and policymakers to focus sustainability efforts on initiatives where a significant positive environmental impact is identified, using scientifically robust, internationally applied methodologies to calculate the environmental footprint of products. Going forward, the EU should incentivize innovation by establishing overall goals and outcomes as opposed to prescribing specific technological solutions.
Likewise, we share President Von der Leyen and her Commission’s goals to improve sustainability and circularity of products. That’s why industry is leading efforts to address global environmental and sustainability challenges, as well as security and resiliency challenges we are facing, and turn them into opportunities for business and citizens. We urge President Von der Leyen to launch a fact-based reflection on the actual impact of EU policies under this closing EU cycle on the Continent’s investment attractiveness for the global tech industry.
Finally, it’s time to achieve a resilient and competitive Europe by securing openness and attractiveness for business. As a result of global trends, the EU has begun to shift from an open market approach towards protectionism, including through data localisation, disrupted data flows, differentiated regulatory treatment of global firms, and fragmented approaches to standardisation. However, for Europe to achieve its digitalization goals, it should pursue open, collaborative and international approaches, which remains essential to ensuring availability of critical technologies given highly integrated global supply chains. We encourage policymakers to align on these approaches with like-minded partners such as the U.S. Doing so is a critical component for success. Europe’s next chapter is the opportunity to re-state its commitment to an open and trade-oriented approach to EU policy, which is crucial to support supply chain resiliency and availability of key technologies with historic partners.
Tech policy has been a crucial priority for the EU in the current political cycle, and will remain prominent during the coming years. At ITI, we share the firm belief that building trust, promoting international cooperation, and fostering innovation are essential to Europe’s competitiveness and resiliency. We hope President Von der Leyen seizes this opportunity to communicate her vision for important and needed change.