The High Level Industrial Roundtable presents its vision for the European Industry by 2030 and presents key actions that help achieving the targets.
In December 2017, the Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs (DG GROW) of the European Commission (EC) appointed 20 independent experts to form the high-level industrial roundtable. The newly published report ‘A vision for the European industry until 2030’ captures the outcomes of this roundtable discussion group. It presents the group’s strategic vision for the future industry of the European Union (EU), together with the underlying global trends until 2030 and key drivers that will lead the EU industry to its future success. Lastly, the report gives an outlook onto actions that have to be taken to reach the presented vision of the industry in 2030.
The members of the industrial high-level roundtable want the EU industry by 2030 to be a major driver for economic success and to connect the economic dimension to the major environmental and societal challenges that the EU is facing. This means that a future innovative and globally competitive industry must also become sustainable and human-centred. Trends of digitisation, technological progress on e.g. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and new manufacturing methods will transform the EU industry, which further has to be compatible with new economic models such as e.g. circular economy. EU companies have to operate in a changing global context, i.e. under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the United Nation’s (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (see SwissCore article), while still being globally competitive.
The report mentions five key drivers that will enable the transition to realising the vision of the future industry 2030. These are:
- Leadership in technology, innovation and sustainability
- Anticipating and developing skills
- Strategic value creation networks
- A fair, competitive and agile business environment
- Social fairness and well-being
Combining different fields such as technology, innovation and sustainability underlines the importance of a policy mix for the industrial transformation. The EU offers important tools under its current innovation-friendly policy, e.g. to pool financial resources from both the public and private sector to invest into technologies fostering sustainability. Further, it is crucial to connect education policy to industrial policy, in order to provide people with skills necessary for the future industry. By involving stakeholders and the public in the process of identifying future challenges that can be tackled by innovative solutions, technologies have the potential to be more widely accepted (see SwisCore article).
Finally, the report mentions three areas of delivery action; these are to manage a fast and inclusive transformation, to champion global competitiveness and to address social inclusiveness and values. With respect to the first delivery action, the report mentions the importance of transferring knowledge stemming from European research to European businesses to benefit the European economy. Important tools for this task are digital innovation hubs and regional AI excellence centres (see SwissCore article) to also boost the digital economy. Further, the report calls upon the EC to develop a guidance document, to elaborate on how EU innovation policy can help achieving the SDGs. In light of all three delivery action areas, the report mentions several concrete ‘game-changing actions’ that could support the transition process and the responsible actors e.g. EU, Member States, regional authorities. Examples of these actions are to establish a ‘Cluster of Change’ within the EU cluster policy together with the smart specialisation approach, or to come up with a ‘Carbon-Leakage 2.0’ plan, i.e. a new approach for dealing with the carbon leakage (see current Carbon Leakage policy of the EC).