The European Innovation Council (EIC) should be run by a high profile tech entrepreneur, says Intel vice-president and director of Intel Labs Europe Martin Curley.
The position would mirror that of the chief technology officer in the US, a position introduced by President Barack Obama in 2009. The responsibilities it carries are amorphous: the holder of the role advises on new technology policy, recruits more tech talent into government and identifies novel ways to improve the quality of government digital services.
The EIC is expected to be piloted next year but there is still plenty of debate inside the European Commission about the profile of person needed to run it, as well as what their area of responsibility should be.
It would help the cause of the EIC to have a known and respected technologist as its head, Curley told Science|Business
Curley oversees a constellation of more than 40 research labs from his base in Ireland. He believes a high ranking Silicon Valley-type would be a strong sell to the European tech community and would help dispel perceptions of the EU as a body which gets in the way and slows things down.
Google veteran Megan Smith, an MIT-trained mechanical engineer who was most recently vice president of the company’s Google[X] “moonshot lab”, was appointed in September 2014 as the third chief technology officer under the Obama administration. She has since reportedly hired over 200 people from internet giants like Facebook, Amazon, Google to work for the government.
Promoting change
An EU chief technology officer would also be an ally for change, Curley said. “In Europe, innovation is the poor cousin of research. We do have some problems. We’re lagging behind the US and South Korea in terms of innovation performance. The only indicator we’re leading on is number of publications.
“It’s partly an input problem. The ratio of our support for basic [versus] applied research in Europe is something like 70:30. In the US and China, it’s essentially the other way around.”
It is here where the focus of the new EIC should be. “It could implement new incentives for applied research. Right now, the situation with public support is very ad-hoc. Good outcomes are often more through luck than design.
“The European innovation ecosystem has great potential and the EIC could be the right instrument to fully unleash it,” he added.
Receive our news bulletin each Tuesday & Thursday and news about bridging Europe’s east-west innovation gap twice a month in The Widening. 
