This Dialogue discussed how EU innovation policy can boost industrial growth in Europe. A lack of entrepreneurship in Europe was identified as a key problem that could be addressed by, for example, education and using role models. Another key issue for Europe is to find ways to attract private investment.

Broadly speaking, the way forward appears to be to design a strategy harnessing Europe’s brainpower (e.g. engineering and manufacturing skills) to develop advanced technologies to produce new goods and services with high added value (e.g. smart clean technologies). To this end, several initiatives have already been implemented at the EU level and need to be pursued.

Big data, smart sensors, machine to machine connections and the internet of things are areas that companies can work on to ensure that Europe takes the lead in terms of having the best technologies, smarter value chains and more development of clusters.