Press Release: Commission advocates new approach to investing public money in risky high-tech research

The Commission proposed today a new strategy for harnessing the innovative potential of public spending in Europe in the field of Research and Development (R&D). Europe lags considerably behind the US in terms of R&D spending and has made catching up a priority of the renewed Lisbon strategy. Where Europe could do substantially more is at the pre-commercial stage, where products and services are not yet ripe for the market, and where investment is particularly risk-prone, but is key for research breakthroughs. This is why the Commission decided today to advocate the procurement of public R&D spending already in this pre-commercial phase. For the Commission, such pre-commercial public procurement could tap unused potential especially in high tech areas, such as research into information and communication technologies for health care and medicine. Important technological innovations such as the Internet Protocol or the Global Positioning System (GPS) would have been unthinkable without combined spending by the public sector and private companies.