Another day, another trio of serious institutions telling us Europe cannot solve its scale-up problem without first solving its capital markets problem.

It won’t mainstream innovative procurement, but it is a clear signal the Commission is taking the startup and scaleup demand-side dilemma seriously.

If Europe is going to win on deep tech, the challenge for the Commission is less one of finding more priorities, than finding a better way to prioritise.

This position is now closed. But we are always looking for our next new colleague, so do send over a CV, cover letter, and anything else you think we’d be interested in reading!

It’s not what you say (it’s how early and often you say it)

Complex Adaptive Systems… all the way down.

Europe’s approach to generating demand for innovation is sending mixed signals to would-be innovators and investors.

Stripping back the rhetoric, the Strategy is essentially a (mostly supply-side) market-building exercise.

And the risk of over-indexing on nationality and political group affiliation in voting analyses.

Has Europe picked all its low-hanging regulatory fruit?

Europe should develop a small, flexible, experimental programme to identify, recruit, and exploit the potential of its top scientists.

or: You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

Bubbles can speed up the rate of technological progress and breakthroughs. We might be in the nascent stages of some technological bubbles in the EU. Whether they succeed could depend on the signals EU policymakers send to would-be innovators and investors.

A few preliminary thoughts on Trump’s victory yesterday, how it will impact the EU’s Strategic Autonomy agenda, and what it the latter about the EU as a Complex System.

Part three of three on why (and how) the Brussels Bubble must re-discover its sense of optimism.

Part two of three on why (and how) the Brussels Bubble must re-discover its sense of optimism.

Part one of three on why (and how) the Brussels Bubble must re-discover its sense of optimism.

On the benefits of rolling strategies out quickly, then iterating.

Helping innovators find a way out of the polycrisis.