Competition, Collaboration and Integration

Abstract

The lessons learned from early collaborative R&D experiments had begun to sink in by the time new debates arose in the 1980s about Europe’s (apparently) declining technological competitiveness, and what to do about it. By the middle of the decade, a critical mass of European governments had been persuaded to believe that the continent’s competitive crisis required a general relaunch of the Community and a radical programme of deregulation and liberalisation. The EU’s enhanced policy role as a promoter of innovation was, in important respects, boosted by the 1992 project. A crucial element of the project was a political commitment to reduce state aids to industry, an important slice of which subsidised R&D. Partly because they promised to compensate for new restrictions on national policy actions, the Framework programme and EUREKA became viewed as important policy tools in a more general effort to kick-start Europe’s high-tech industries out of the doldrums of the national champion days.