Andrea DiMaio

I am in rainy Brussels where, on my own time, I am helping former colleagues from the European Commission select innovative projects in the context of one of the EU programs to stimulate research and development as well as uptake of several innovative technologies. Overall budgets for these programs are multi-billion euro and each call for proposals commits from a few dozens to a few hundreds millions by assigning funds to projects of different size (from few hundred thousands to several millions euro). This is of course just a drop in the ocean of what gets invested in IT R&D all over the EU, but certainly an important one to stimulate cooperation across borders, reduce the risk of technology adoption for users and give more chances to smaller vendors.

In going to the nice new building where the evaluation is conducted, close to the North Station, I walked in front of the even nicer skyscraper that hosts the headquarters of Dexia, the second Belgian bank in trouble after Fortis. TV crews were in front of the building, stopping clients as well as employees and asking them what they thought about the situation, after the bad news had been aired just the night before.

This made me reflect about the striking contrast between the importance of investing in long term programs like the one I am currently evaluating, and the urgency of helping people who may very soon lose their jobs or savings or both. My colleague Dave McClure and I will present at the Orlando Symposium on “Government Scenario: Surviving Today, Shaping Up For Tomorrow“, and I could not find a more real, and – to some extent – troubling example of that conflict.

As I said in my previous post, it is difficult to imagine that the massive government intervention to rescue financial institutions on both sides of the Atlantic will not have a significant impact on the ability to invest on research, technology transfer and innovation in general. On the other hand, unless we innovate on many fronts (technology, processes and behaviors), we won’t be immune from future crises.