The baseline diagnosis is well known yet remains troubling: Europe produces world-class science, but the path from the laboratory to the market continues to be, in far too many cases, a route without a clear roadmap. To address this issue, Brussels is articulating two complementary initiatives—the European Strategy for Research and Technology Infrastructures and the EU Startups and Scaleups Strategy—under the umbrella of the Choose Europe campaign, which now incorporates an explicit focus on attracting global scientific talent.
Infrastructures Without Internal Borders
For decades, research infrastructures—such as synchrotrons, industrial testing platforms, and quantum computing laboratories—operated in silos, segregated by their focus on either basic or applied research. The new strategy blurs this distinction, treating them as a complementary innovation pipeline in which open, seamless access serves as the foundational prerequisite.
The core instrument is an Access Charter that guarantees industrial users—particularly deep-tech startups—simplified terms for utilizing world-class facilities without becoming bogged down in administrative bureaucracy. This is complemented by a European coordinated demand network designed to reduce regional disparities and prevent the costly duplication of capabilities, alongside joint investment roadmaps among Member States in domains such as quantum computing, clean energy, and advanced materials.
Digital integration and artificial intelligence emerge as overarching priorities: functioning not merely as subjects of research, but as tools to accelerate physical discovery within the infrastructures themselves.
The Framework to Prevent Startup Emigration
The Strategy for Startups and Scaleups addresses one of the most persistent weaknesses of the European ecosystem: high-growth firms tend to seek capital and scaling opportunities outside the continent. The new framework introduces four concrete levers.
The 28th Regime establishes a voluntary corporate legal framework that operates alongside national legislations, enabling the incorporation of a European-wide entity within 48 hours, subject to harmonized tax and insolvency obligations. The European Innovation Act standardizes regulatory sandboxes so that startups in high-risk sectors—such as biotechnology and autonomous systems—can test innovations under real-world conditions without immediately triggering full regulatory compliance mechanisms.
The European Scaleup Fund is a capital vehicle aimed at bridging the late-stage funding gap, targeting rounds exceeding 50 million euros in deep tech, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence. Finally, the Lab-to-Unicorn initiative connects university hubs across Europe to ensure that publicly funded research secures growth capital and corporate mentorship from the moment it leaves the laboratory.
Talent: The Third Vector
The Choose Europe campaign introduces a geopolitical dimension to the overarching strategy. Against a backdrop of global realignment—with the United States revising its research and scientific mobility policies—Europe positions itself as a secure, transparent destination committed to academic freedom.
The relaunch of the European Research Area reinforces this message through structural reforms: pension portability for mobile researchers, standardized framework agreements for scientific careers, and the expansion of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. The objective is to enable talent to move seamlessly across countries and between academia and industry without bureaucratic obstacles acting as a barrier.
Collective Intelligence: The ‘Share What Works!’ Call for Proposals
To translate policy into practice, the Commission has launched an open call for best practices targeting infrastructure operators, university technology transfer offices, and corporate innovators. The objective is to identify proven collaboration models between large-scale scientific infrastructures and agile enterprises, with a focus on streamlined procurement procedures, sustainable co-funding models, and support mechanisms tailored to small market actors.
The outcomes are not merely intended for documentation purposes; rather, they will feed into European dissemination campaigns and a web-based best practices platform designed to enable lesser-known facilities to replicate the industrial access models that are already operational in the continent’s major hubs.
The Added Value of the Compass: Europe’s Challenge Was Not One of Extremes, but of Connections
For years, the debate surrounding the European innovation gap centered on two competing diagnoses: either a scarcity of scientific output or a deficit of capital. Both premises were partially valid yet fundamentally insufficient. Europe possessed world-class laboratories, alongside—albeit to a lesser extent—capital willing to invest in technology. What it lacked was the connective infrastructure joining these two ends: accessible contracts allowing a startup to utilize a synchrotron without requiring a ten-person legal team; legal frameworks that do not force a choice between national identity and European scale; and capital available at the precise moment when research exits the laboratory prior to demonstrating commercial traction. These are neither problems of funding nor of scientific excellence; rather, they represent structural flaws in system architecture. Systemic architecture problems are precisely the most difficult to discern, as they remain invisible across standard metrics until their consequences have fully materialized. The significance of the European strategy lies not in injecting additional resources into opposite ends of the value chain, but in directing focus, for the first time, to the space bridging them.
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