Extremely interesting session this morning where I had both a speaker and a rapporteur role for the Plenary session on Friday “Building europe for Business”.

Here are some first quick notes I took, I am trying to write some of what we discussed, not my personal ideas even though they are quite similar to the below ideas.

Some issues

-The EU may miss its objective of being one of the most competitive and dynamic part of the world by 2010
-The 15 current members joined by the 10 new ones in a few days are behind the US in terms of R&D and innovation, creating an information society and encouraging entrepreneurship in Europe

Some good news

-Nordic EU members are actually ahead of the USA in many different aspects of their development
-Europe at large is ahead in sustainable development, social protection and Telecom
-The 10 accessing countries are used to change, and change fast “We should see enlargment as a vitamin injection to our EU affairs” Leif Pagrotsky, Minister for Trade and Industry of Sweden

We live an historic moment with the 10 countries joining the EU, 74 million more people will join but only contributing to the GDP by 5% and with a labor cost of only 1/5th of the 15 other members and other key advantages, the opportunities of growth for these countries (which is above other members’ growth) and for EU as a whole are incredible.

Some first solutions

Decrease EU and Countries Regulations, Bureaucracy and Taxation,
-adapt the Entrepreneur friendly fiscal framework of the accessing countries to the 15 members as much as possible, not the opposite which would mean transposing the slow moving, business-enemy environment of some of the 15 to the 10. In Austria, for every Euro net to bring home for a person out of their job, the cost is 4 euros for the company.
-make it easy to create a company, make a European company structure a reality, get results in European patent and branding.

Entrepreneurship
-gather best local european experiences in terms of entrepreneurship and best business practices in the EU and share them
-give access to people superior education, integrate much more entrepreneurship and business awareness lessons to educational programs, teach entrepreneurship to schools
-improve the image of Entrepreneurship in Europe by better explaining the key role they play (like contribution to jobs creation and growth). People, media and politicians should better understand Entrepreneurs. Compared to the USA, their image is totally different. If they fail, they are considered as losers. If they succeed, they do not get the same respect for what they have done, the jobs they created and the value they added to Society by taking risks as in the USA where many of them are even considered as heroes
-acceptance of risks. Risk should become more desirable economically and socially, Europe is too much living in comfort to a point that its growth, innovation and entrepreneurship are in danger
-the 10 countries that join the EU have a different agenda than the others. Poland has about 20% unemployment, the only option is “hunger to succeed” and entrepreneurs are becoming very active because “this is the only way to go”. We should communicate and transfer some of that hunger to succeed, take risks and build businesses to “Old Europe” that is seen as “being comfortable” with high social protection and low working hours (France’s 35 hours a week were mentioned many times by Participants for example)”. “Being comfortable is impossible and illusive”. There was a general consensus around the fact that we should take more risks and get out a bit of our current protection to innovate and create, or the EU will just lose ground against the US of course but more important against countries like China and India. The ideal if leisure and less working time (France’s 35 hours a week law) are not sustainable to make the EU competitive. Too much of a comfortable life makes people too risk averse (young people in France taking advantages of the welfare state to take one year off their jobs and take holidays happened frequently when the Internet bubble burst).
-promote the role of early stage investments in young companies, the role of business angels, help young companies get initial financing

Gather best practices and create centers of excellence
-create centers of excellence, and especially create a Silicon Valley of Europe. There must be centers of excellence fostering innovation and entrepreneurship. To get to that result, mobility of EU citizens should be improved by promoting it, making it easy for people to move from one country to another (ensuring portability of pensions for example, ease the way people can get hired anywhere in Europe and what companies have to do to hire EU citizens).

Some examples of Europeans successes that may be made centers of Excellence:

-Telecom in Nordic Region,
-London as a Global Financial hub contributes in an increase of 31 B euros in European GDP
-Retail and distribution expertise in the UK (Tesco), France (Promodes, Auchan), Belgium (Delhaize), Ikea (Sweden) and El Corte Ingles (Spain)
-Fast paced Ireland transformation
-Nano technology R&D (Germany, Hungary) – just heard it, need to get more details-
-Pau Broadband country that has 100Mbps of bandwidth to every home with fiber connections,
-Italy and France for Design and Fashion, Luxury Sector, egovernment in Estonia.

Education
-Education and training need reform. European students are some of the best educated in the world, but face obstacles in becoming “stars” or innovators. Lifelong education is the way forward and should be supported by government and companies. Accessibility is a key issue.
-make businesses contribute more to society by building strong links with Universities and finance them, one of the key reason of success of Silicon Valley. Many companies there were created by students in Stanford and Berkeley, not only Google.
-increase competition between Universities (for example have the students rank their teachers)

Information Society
-focus on egovernance and make it a top agenda for Governments, focusing on how to implement by also gathering the best practices (there is big diversity in implementation in the EU, you can get a new passport in Poland on the Internet in three days where it may take three weeks with a lot of administrative work in other countries for example).
–Technology and Internet access should be available to everyone, everywhere.

The E-Estonia case:
-paperless internet platform used by Ministers that saves 200 000 EUR per year in paper and copying costs
-e-voting option for 2005
-”I decide today” e-society: Ministries upload all their draft bills and amendments allowing people to review, comment and suggest amendments. 5% of all ideas are used as amendments to bills.
-Ecitizen: 60% of the population are everyday Internet users, 71% of home computers connected to the Internet with a majority with broadband access. Guaranteed Internet access to each of Estonian citizens, 51 free Public Internet Access per 100 000 people in 2003 and 200 areas with high-speed wireless.

-Europe must invest more in R&D and innovation. This will stem today’s brain drain. Also, better coordination is needed between business, the market, universities and research institutes. 3000 French scientists went on strike in France recently.

The room concluded also by the fact that this challenge cannot be taken by only one group in society, it is a multi-stakeholders challenge involving Governments, Business, Research, Education and other groups. Building a business-friendly Europe depends less on the “what” than the “how”. Equally important is measurability of success. Said clearly: “You cannot manage what you cannot measure”.

What do you think are other solutions for building a more business friendly Europe ? There is of course much we could not cover in only a hour and a half.

Help me get more ideas and concrete actions to the Plenary session on Friday !

The official summary of the session is Posted by Loic Le Meur at 01:25