Europe deserves a better European Research Area policy | EurActiv

"Professor Miguel Seabra is President of Science Europe, an association of European research funding and performing organisations. He is also President of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. Giants like Google, Siemens, General Electric, Bayer, Apple or Phillips are part of an ecosystem that largely relies on publicly-funded research, infrastructures and human resources. Without the complex ecosystem that is nourished by states, such companies would dry up and fall like leaves off a dead tree. This should be common knowledge. Instead, it seems to be the world’s best kept secret. So much so, that a book making a similar case – Mariana Mazzuccato’s The Entrepreneurial State – earned its author international acclaim and various mentions as best book of the year as recently as 2013. The proposition is not even new. Older studies, like Funding a Revolution in the 1990s, linked decades-long public funding for computing research, to innovations such as the internet and relational databases. These innovations are the foundations of today’s ICT businesses. The technologies matured to fruition thanks to an intense interplay between public and private sector are all around us. Smartphones and optical fibres owe their existence to basic research that is more than a century old. The technological revolutions to come, like biotech or the space industry, are no exception. The lesson we can draw is that above and beyond short-term programming and objectives, states need to create and nourish a vital tissue made of universities, researchers, trainers, infrastructures, so that their societies are able to engage in knowledge-intensive activities. As a result, states need to act with a systemic perspective, thinking long-term, and risking more, and for longer, than private initiative is willing to ..."