The Innovation Act: The Right Signal, but Not the Bold Leap Europe Needs

As a network of innovative and challenge-based universities, ECIU welcomes the European Innovation Act proposal. But if Europe is serious about achieving its competitiveness goals and becoming a global innovation leader, universities cannot remain peripheral to its innovation strategy. They are essential partners, not optional contributors: they develop talent, generate knowledge, foster innovation and build the ecosystems that turn ideas into societal and economic value. An Act that fails to place universities at its core falls short of the bold leap Europe needs.

ECIU welcomes the European Commission’s ambition to strengthen Europe’s innovation capacity and improve the conditions for translating research and knowledge into societal and economic value. We endorse measures on innovation procurement, cross-border innovation, and the valuation and financing of intangible assets, as these proposals address real barriers that continue to limit innovation across Europe.

At the same time, the proposal falls short of the ambition and breadth signalled during the consultation process (see ECIU input here). Its focus remains largely on the later stages of innovation, including commercialisation, market access, finance and intellectual property. While measures to improve IP commercialisation are welcome, they should be complemented by an enabling framework for collaborative IP creation and exploitation, including clearer State Aid guidance and better-aligned ownership and licensing practices between universities, industry and public actors. This builds on ECIU’s previous call for greater regulatory clarity, more effective IP transfer and stronger support for Technology Transfer Offices.

While universities are major contributors to Europe’s technological and innovation base, and the title of the Act is establishing a framework of measures for strengthening the Union innovation ecosystem, universities are largely absent from the proposal. The growing role of universities in innovation is demonstrated by the proportion of European patents linked to university researchers, which increased from 5% in 2000 to 9% in 2020, approaching the level of the US. At the same time, European universities have taken a much more active role in managing their intellectual assets: the share of academic patents for which universities themselves were named as applicants increased from 23% in 2000 to 53% in 2020¹. These developments underline the growing contribution of European universities to patenting and the increasing role they play in managing academic IP.  

These trends show that universities are not peripheral to European innovation. They are important generators and increasingly active stewards of intellectual assets. Yet Europe continues to struggle to translate its strong research and technology base into market uptake and scale. This reflects the broader competitiveness challenge identified in the Draghi report: universities and research institutions are central to early-stage innovation, while Europe remains weaker further along the innovation pipeline, including in commercialising fundamental research.  

A truly transformative European Innovation Act must therefore strengthen the whole innovation pathway, not only its later stages. Europe needs the capacity to generate new knowledge and entrepreneurial talent, mature promising technologies, experiment with new solutions and move them faster towards deployment and scale-up. Universities are crucial throughout this journey, yet they are largely absent from the proposal.

Universities educate future innovators, generate new knowledge, support entrepreneurship, operate research and technology infrastructures, facilitate knowledge transfer and connect research, business, government and society. Innovation is rarely a linear process from laboratory to market. It emerges through collaboration between students, researchers, companies, public authorities and citizens. Europe’s innovation policies must therefore take a more systemic view, recognising the interaction between research, education, innovation and societal engagement.

Europe’s challenge is also one of innovation capacity and connectivity. Universities generate and increasingly manage significant intellectual assets, but many do not have access to the competences needed to bring IP successfully to market. Effective commercialisation requires expertise beyond patent protection, including technology maturation, market assessment, business development, licensing, access to finance, investors and international markets. Recent European technology-transfer evidence identifies challenges across precisely this broader journey, from researcher awareness and reliable patent budgets to maturation, specialist skills, workable transaction rules and market access.

Europe’s challenge therefore goes beyond IP ownership and commercialisation rules. Universities need access to the right expertise, technology-maturation support, finance and market connections to turn promising intellectual assets into successful innovations. Rather than expecting every university to maintain the full range of these competences in-house, Europe should facilitate shared access to specialist expertise, technology intelligence, market knowledge, finance and investor networks across borders.

Europe does not lack strong innovation ecosystems, but they remain fragmented. The Innovation Act is a great opportunity to strengthen connections between regional ecosystems across borders, enabling knowledge, talent, infrastructures and solutions to circulate and scale across Europe. Systemic European partnerships, such as the European University Alliances, can play a particular role as existing connectors between these ecosystems, linking universities and their surrounding networks of companies, public authorities and societal actors across borders. By building on these established partnerships, Europe can connect place-based innovation strengths, provide access to complementary capabilities and turn them into innovation capacity at European scale.

ECIU believes the European Innovation Act should place greater emphasis on:

• Talent development and entrepreneurial skills, including challenge-based learning and stronger support for academic entrepreneurship, with AI literacy, digital innovation skills and entrepreneurial competences systematically embedded in higher education and lifelong learning policies.
• Mobility and knowledge circulation between academia, industry and the public sector, enabling people, knowledge and experience to move more easily across sectors.‍
• Recognition and incentives for researchers to engage in innovation, entrepreneurship, knowledge valorisation and societal impact, building on the European Research Area Act’s ambition to improve research careers and intersectoral mobility. Assessment and funding systems, and innovation policies more broadly, should recognise social, educational, public-sector and organisational innovations alongside traditional IP-based indicators.
• Greater access to risk-tolerant funding and a stronger culture of experimentation, allowing researchers and universities to pursue high-risk, high-potential ideas and supporting them from early experimentation and technology maturation through to growth and scale-up.
• Simpler and faster innovation pathways, reducing unnecessary administrative and regulatory barriers and shortening the journey from research and experimentation to deployment and scale-up.
• Academic freedom and institutional autonomy as foundations of long-term innovation and breakthrough discoveries. The Innovation Act should complement the European Research Area Act in safeguarding the framework conditions that allow researchers to pursue new and high-risk ideas.
• ‍Regulatory sandboxes, Living Labs and experimentation environments, enabling universities, cities and public authorities to act as first adopters and testbeds for innovative solutions developed through European research and innovation programmes. Support should include cross-border Living Labs where universities, cities, industry and citizens can co-develop, test and validate innovations in real-life environments before large-scale deployment.
• ‍Removing barriers to collaborative knowledge creation and transfer, including greater clarity and a more innovation-friendly interpretation of EU State Aid rules, as well as better-aligned approaches to IP valuation, ownership and licensing across universities, industry and public actors. This corresponds to barriers previously identified by ECIU around State Aid and IP transfer.‍
• Connect regional innovation ecosystems across borders to enable knowledge, talent, infrastructures and solutions to circulate and scale across Europe. The Act should recognise universities as anchor institutions in regional innovation ecosystems and provide targeted support for connecting less innovation-intensive regions to European innovation networks, fostering inclusive, collaborative and place-based innovation.
• ‍Stronger and better-connected knowledge and technology-transfer capacity, giving universities access to the expertise, finance, market knowledge and networks needed to bring promising research and IP to market, including through shared capacities across institutions and borders.
• More systematic engagement with Technology Transfer Offices and knowledge-transfer professionals in innovation policy-making, drawing on their practical experience of identifying, protecting, developing and transferring research results and connecting researchers with companies, investors and entrepreneurs.

ECIU welcomes the proposed framework for innovation procurement and the ambition to improve the use and valuation of intellectual assets. However, Europe’s innovation challenge will not be solved through procurement, IP and regulation alone. Innovation requires talented people, entrepreneurial and risk-taking cultures, connected ecosystems, effective knowledge transfer and the capacity to move ideas and solutions faster from experimentation to impact.

Europe needs to become better not only at commercialising today’s knowledge, but also at creating tomorrow’s. Universities are central to this ambition: they educate talent, generate breakthrough knowledge, create and manage intellectual assets, support new ventures, connect actors across sectors, and provide environments where new ideas can be tested, developed and translated into societal and economic value.

The European Innovation Act sends the right signal, but Europe needs a bolder and more systemic approach to innovation. To deliver on its ambition, the Act must place universities, people and connected innovation ecosystems at the heart of Europe’s innovation agenda. ECIU therefore calls on the European Parliament and the Council to build a framework that strengthens the entire innovation pathway, explicitly recognises universities as key innovation actors, and connects innovation and technology-transfer capacities across borders. Only by linking Europe’s strengths can we turn excellent ideas into impact at scale.

_{[1] EPO 2026 Europe’s technology transfer landscape}