Ekaterina Zaharieva Talks EU Investment into Research
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There's no business like small business. Hiscox Small Business Insurance. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Katarina Zejardjević, you're the EU Commissioner for Innovation, Startups and Research. Thank you so much for joining us on Bloomberg today. You've just released this Choose Europe plan. This is going to flesh out the strategy to boost research within Europe. There's half a billion dollars at stake here. Talk us through a little bit of the strategy and what you're trying to achieve here.

The strategy is very simple. First, Europe always chooses science and we want science to choose Europe. So that means that for Europe science should remain open and independent and we respect scientific freedom. This is the first, so to say, pillar of this strategy and the second is of course investing in talent.

And the third is like accelerate and boost innovation. So those are the three focuses on this Choose Europe for science, Choose Europe for business, I would say. And so when you think about sort of half a billion dollars being deployed to that end, how is that money sort of productively spent in order to achieve those ends? So this is the half a billion for the next two and a half years until the end of this programming period of the biggest actually program

programme for research and innovation in the world, which is Horizon Europe programme. That means that we want to focus of course on the early career researchers. We actually work on the pilot Choose Europe for science for the early career researchers and then we have European Research Council

in which council the scientists decide the priorities, the cause and choose the projects, absolutely autonomous and independent of the politicians. And we want to deploy extra 220 million for the next, actually 280 million almost for the extra support for researchers, which is a research council with more focus on

really the best researchers with their teams in the world. And you say it's sort of value neutral in terms of what the science is investigating, but there certainly are objectives within the European Union to try to boost certain sectors and innovate and things like that. So what sectors are you trying to get, sort of attract more of those researchers and scientists in order to give Europe that competitive edge?

You know, European Research Council, I want to say it, but of course I'm going to talk about the sectors later. European Research Council is really bottom-up driven. It's open for everybody. It's curiosity-driven projects. So this is actually the fundamental, the basic research.

which we cannot have excellent innovation and breakthrough technologies. So this is for the European Research Council. But of course the sectors who have really common European interests are really important for European competitiveness, European economic security,

It's like, I'm not going to surprise nobody, it's AI, of course, life sciences, it's bioeconomy, it's clean tech. So those are sectors, quantum, which one we are focused on, European Innovation Council and space.

And so one of those sort of sectors, because I know I was talking to a startup in Germany, they did fusion, right? They do sort of nuclear fusion, right? And so what they had is their German company. They had all the research out of Munich. They're very sort of well-equipped on the science. But then Colorado, the state of Colorado, came and gave them a grant for $200 million, and they went to go build the lab in the United States. And this is one of the sort of things that Mario Draghi brought up, is that many of the unicorns within Europe eventually leave Europe. How do you solve that problem? How do you keep European innovation European?

Yeah, this is a really important part. As I said, the third pillar of Choose Europe is accelerating innovation. We are excellent in starting in research and the startups. Actually, Europe creates more startups compared to the United States and China.

But yeah, we have problems, Draghi says, in the scale-up phase. So there is no big pan-European VCs yet. But we're improving actually. If you see the data about the VCs in Europe in the last couple of years, actually they are improving, there is more investment in VCs. What we work is a start-up and scale-up strategy. I'm very focused actually, I'm the first start-up commissioner.

ever in the history. We are focusing on the startup and scale-up strategy with the four pillars like talent, always talent, talent, talent is important for innovation. Those are the three T's of innovation. The finance, which is how to create big funds enough together with the private sector because public funding will be never enough.

and access to market, which is crucial, which means fast access to the market, which means also public procurement, which we have an entire potential there. And then we have regulatory obstacles and of course access to infrastructure, which is also very important for innovators. And then you talk about the three T's in terms of talent. There is potentially a great pool... This is the biggest strength of Europe actually.

Right, well there's potentially a bigger pool for the Europeans to tap in the United States where you've seen a lot of research, for example, being cut to certain institutions within the US. What kind of opportunity does that provide to the European Union, the potential brain drain from the United States? Are you looking to capitalize on that? Are there ways in which you can tap into that talent pool that may be looking for... I'll be honest, yes, it's a big opportunity for Europe.

I think what happens is there is a chance for Europe because you know that finance has been stopped for research in health, in vaccination for example, vaccines, in science linked with climate change.

some social science perspective, so it's a big chance for Europe to attract some of the best researchers and scientists from the United States to come and work with their colleagues here, Europeans. And that's why the European Research Council, these grants that we provide, it's an excellent chance for them to move here with their teams. And do you get a sense that that process is a little bit under way? Are you hearing from people? Is there some kind of... I have information from European universities

that there is a big interest from their colleagues from the United States and they are looking for how eventually they can relocate and move here. And one of the issues I think also in the United States versus Europe is that they also pay a lot better in the United States. How do you solve this in terms of the private sector? I don't know. Maybe some universities pay more, but not always it's about the money only. If you are not allowed to research,

money doesn't matter that much because you actually have to stop your project. Right, the highest price is freedom. So it's really freedom, it matters, social condition matters. That's why I always start with the first actually

pure of Choose Europe is that for Europe, science matters. For Europe, science has to remain open and independent and scientists have to have a freedom for research. And I think that another thing that I've observed in Europe is that you also have a lot of very sort of

impressive academic institutions, a lot of impressive research, huge amounts of research, but you don't see that translate as often into the private sector, I think, as you do in the United States. How do you get things to move from just sort of sheerly academic research into something that can be productivity driven, profit driven, and really just companies within Europe? You know, yeah, we have this

I would say challenges that not very often the really excellent universities and research organizations are working with the private sector, but we have more and more who do this. And for example, I'm going to mention again Horizon, which is actually almost half of the funds from Horizon Europe. It's a cooperative research, which means academia and private sector, traditional industries and public institutions work together

to find solutions to global challenges. So we have really huge progress in that direction as well. So it's a big part of our program, but it's not only the European funds. I see more and more

research organization who are very close with the private companies. I also meet a lot of traditional, big organization of traditional European industry, strong industries and they also want to invest and work together. They also want to invest in the European startups. They also want to invest in European research organizations. So we are moving in the right direction. We have the instruments actually. As I mentioned, it's Horizon Europe program, but we have also Digital Europe.

and other partnerships together, academia and private sector. And one of the industries that is attracting a huge volume of capital within Europe is the defence sector. I wonder if there is some kind of partnership available, because obviously a lot of innovation does sometimes come from the defence sector into other applications. Are there ways in which these two can work together? Definitely, definitely. They should work together.

Because for a long time some of these funds would be restricted away from defense. Yes, as Horizon, for example, Horizon Europe is only civilian research, but in European Innovation Council, this is one of the pillars of Horizon Europe, which is innovation, focus on innovation, on the startups, and the European Innovation Council accelerator, we did propose, this is the first omnibus of defense,

to open it for the OUS and Defence research and the same is like a step which is investment in equity in startups of strategic interests. We want to open also for the OUS and Defence because in the modern research

almost everything can have a dual application, both civilian and research. I think it's a huge potential, yes. And so if we speak a year from now, what is going to be your sort of metrics of success in terms of having launched this successfully and kind of what would you like to see happen a year from now? A year from now? Okay, Europe to...

preserve his first place of attracting talents to be actually the continent the best educated continent we have one fourth of the global researchers are actually in European Union living and working European Union and you want to track more and more but my goal is really to really to shorten the short and the period from the discovery to the market

to be really easy if you are, no matter innovative or well established or young company, if you want to expand in other member states to happen really easily. So this is, I think, the metrics of success to happen in less than one year to be able to operate in our big single market.

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