Viewpoint: Give EIC programme managers more power

Дата публикации: 14-07-2026 05:00:00

Viewpoint: Give EIC programme managers more power
By
Tarmo Puolokainen
Ole
14 Jul 2026




Tarmo Puolokainen, head of analysis and development at the University of Tartu’s centre for entrepreneurship and innovation.

When the European Innovation Council (EIC) was designed as a replica of the breakthrough-funding agencies in the US, it borrowed the most distinctive feature of the model it admired: the programme manager. At the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the programme manager is the closest thing public funding has to a venture capitalist. They make the bets, shape the programme and decide when to double down or pull the plug. The role rests on a single premise: give a trusted expert real authority over a portfolio of long shots and accept that most of them will fail.The EIC hired programme managers and gave them portfolios and a mandate to develop visions for breakthrough technologies. Then it withheld the thing that makes the role work. In the EIC’s selection process, applicants pitch to a jury of independent investors and entrepreneurs, who deliver a binary “go” or “no-go.” The programme manager may sit in the room and ask questions. They do not vote.But an EIC programme manager without a vote is Darpa without the Darpa. Europe imported the form and left the substance behind. As EU co-legislators are in the thick of negotiations for the next Framework Programme, and plans for a bigger and bolder EIC, it is worth asking why that happened, because the same reflex is about to be written into the next generation of instruments.The reflex that hollows out the modelEurope stripped its programme managers of authority for a reason that is, on its own terms, respectable. Handing one official discretionary power over hundreds of millions of euros in public money offends a deep instinct that public spending must be visible, auditable and defensible to a parliament. So the discretion was diffused into committees, scoring rubrics and reporting lines. The model promotes accountability but also inertia. That reflex does not come for free. European firms spend far less on R&D than their US counterparts, Europe captures a fraction of global scale-up capital and the distance from the US and China is widening. The proposed answer includes more money and more Darpa-style agencies. But more money poured into the culture that hollowed out the EIC will not buy risk-tolerance. You cannot purchase boldness while running an apparatus built to punish it.And there is a sharper problem: the apparatus can manufacture the very weakness it is meant to detect. Europe’s policy has long been organised around the European paradox: strong science, weak commercialisation. But European university offices conclude as many licences as US ones once you account for differences in research base and staffing, lagging only on the income they earn. Measured by activity, Europe commercialises. Measured by licensing revenue, a number chosen because it is easy to count, Europe looks broken, and so policymakers are chasing the wrong bottleneck.The deeper damage falls on the institutions doing the work. Hold them to outcome targets and you suppress the risk-taking for which you are paying. Research by Gustavo Manso and Pierre Azoulay, among others, shows that short-cycle, deliverable-driven innovation funding produces measurably fewer breakthroughs than long-horizon, failure-tolerant programmes. But most public innovation instruments are built on the first model, which relies on impact metrics that are due long before any impact could be visible.To be clear about the size of the claim: measurement is not the master cause of Europe’s gap. Capital depth and market fragmentation matter more, but measurement is the cheaper and faster lever and, unlike the capital markets union, it can be changed in the next Framework Programme rather than the next decade.Audit the decision, not the outcomeThe way out is to change the question. Stop asking innovation institutions whether they delivered the outcome. In complex, long-horizon projects the result lands a decade late, depends on many actors and resists attribution. The EU funders should start asking whether innovators decided with integrity.This sounds soft but the most disciplined risk-takers already work this way. A Darpa programme manager must answer, before any money moves, what the mid-term and final “exams” for success will be. Venture capitalists rarely buy an outcome, they buy a tranche tied to a milestone, with the option to continue, abandon or double down at the next gate. Neither is judged on whether the moonshot lands. Each is judged on the quality of decisions at gates set in advance.Public funders can institutionalise this as a transferable instrument: a decision-integrity audit. For each bet, an agency commits in advance to a set of criteria for deciding if and when a bet should continue, pivot or be stopped. Later, an independent auditor checks not whether the bet paid off but whether the agency registered its decision rules in advance and whether its spending tracked its own accumulating evidence. This borrows the core move of open-science pre-registration, applied to institutions. In an EU setting this need not mean new bureaucracy: the function could sit with an independent standing panel, or shift part of the question existing auditors already ask from “was the money spent correctly?” to “were the decisions made with integrity?”The obvious objection is that this just moves the gaming up a level. It does not, for three reasons: the pre-registration is public and time-locked, so criteria cannot be quietly rewritten; the auditor checks consistency, not achievement, so there is no number to maximise; and while a single bet can be staged, a portfolio that never kills anything has already revealed itself.Estonian pilotThe most instructive moves are coming from the EU’s edges. Estonia’s Applied Research Programme funds companies that are pushing high-risk technologies across the valley of death. It used to pay out only after firms had filed hundreds or even thousands of cost documents per project, rewarding paperwork over progress. In 2025, the government rebuilt the logic: money now flows as advances against milestones, continuation depends on periodic expert judgment of whether interim goals are genuinely met, and a project that is not progressing in substance can have its funding cut and redirected to stronger ideas. The minister’s framing was telling: the new model, he said, shows “we trust our entrepreneurs,” and its aim is to avoid the case where “everything looks right on paper but the project has no real substance.”None of this suits every programme: it is for complex, frontier work, not the routine tasks where outcomes are knowable and should simply be measured. Which returns us to the programme manager who cannot vote. The instinct that took their authority was not foolish; it was a demand for accountability Europe is right to make. The error was assuming the only road to accountability runs through outcome metrics. Give them back the vote and pair it with a decision-integrity contract. That is not less accountability than Europe has now. It is more. And it is the kind of accountability that a breakthrough can survive.Tarmo Puolokainen is head of analysis and development at the University of Tartu’s centre for entrepreneurship and innovation.

Схожие новости

#	Наименование новости	Тональность	Информативность	Дата публикации
1	Viewpoint: Scaling up its own innovations will unlock Europe’s energy advantage	0	13.63	09-07-2026
2	Viewpoint: How can we ensure Horizon Europe and the ECF deliver?	0	15.38	16-07-2026
3	Viewpoint: Universities cannot deliver Europe’s ambitions on project funding alone	0	15.72	02-07-2026
4	Viewpoint: Europe needs a new scientific contract	0	15.72	06-08-2026
5	Viewpoint: Robotics should drive Europe’s resilience strategy	0	18.56	24-06-2026
6	Viewpoint: University alliances should be engines of distributed excellence	0	16.42	20-05-2026
7	Europe's lab-to-market gap draws proposals from network of more than 120 scientist-innovators	0	14.38	25-09-2026
8	Viewpoint: Does Europe dare to invest in the Arctic?	0	12.32	27-08-2026
9	Ваша разработка готова, а рынок о ней не знает? Знакомая ...	0	5.32	27-09-2026
10	Viewpoint: Unlocking Europe’s wildfire data	0	17.6	10-09-2026

Классификация: . Схожих патентов: 0. Схожих новостей: 10. Тональность: 0. Информативность: 14.66. Источник: sciencebusiness.net.