Michiel Scheffer — Europe Must Build What It Invents
The EIC Board President sees Europe’s weakness not in scientific discovery, but in the difficult passage from breakthrough technology to industrial deployment, scale and strategic power.
THE PEOPLE SHAPING EUROPE | Michiel Scheffer is helping to redefine European innovation policy. His ambition is to turn the European Innovation Council from a funder of promising projects into an institution capable of building technological portfolios, supporting industrial scale and strengthening Europe’s strategic capacity.
Europe does not lack ideas. Its universities, laboratories and research institutes produce scientific discoveries across fields ranging from quantum technology and biotechnology to energy storage, advanced materials and photonics.
But invention is only the beginning. Deep technologies require years of patient capital, specialised facilities, regulatory approval, industrial partners and customers willing to adopt something that has never before been produced at scale. Many European breakthroughs therefore remain in laboratories, become trapped in demonstration projects or reach commercial maturity elsewhere.
“Europe has the talent and the entrepreneurial drive to lead the next wave of deep tech innovation.”
Michiel Scheffer, President, European Innovation Council Board
Scheffer’s diagnosis is that this is not simply a shortage of venture capital. Europe’s strategic vulnerability lies not in scientific generation, but in its limited capacity for industrial absorption: the ability to connect research, finance, regulation, production and demand around an emerging technology.
Europe’s conversion problem
Scheffer became President of the European Innovation Council Board in 2023, bringing experience from entrepreneurship, research, regional government and innovation policy. That combination matters because he treats innovation not as a linear journey from laboratory to market, but as an institutional process.
Europe is relatively good at financing research and increasingly willing to support start-ups. Its weakness appears in the uncertain middle: when a scientific breakthrough must become a reliable product, a production process and eventually an industrial company.
Scientific excellence is not yet industrial sovereignty.
This passage is especially difficult in deep tech. A software company can often test and distribute a product relatively quickly. A company developing a new battery chemistry, semiconductor architecture or medical technology may require a decade of development before generating significant revenue.
During that period, funding must remain available across different stages. Regulations must permit experimentation and deployment. Manufacturing capacity must be established. Industrial customers must be persuaded to become first adopters.
Mario Draghi’s diagnosis of European competitiveness describes the broader consequence: Europe invests substantially in knowledge and early-stage innovation, but too often loses the subsequent company growth, intellectual property and production capacity to the United States or Asia.
Scheffer wants the EIC to help close that institutional leak.
From projects to portfolios
Established under Horizon Europe, the European Innovation Council combines support for advanced research, technology maturation and company growth through Pathfinder, Transition, Accelerator and the EIC Fund. The architecture attempts to accompany innovation across stages that European policy traditionally treated as separate.
The EIC Accelerator can combine grants with direct equity or equity-like investment. This blended-finance model allows public capital to accept technological risks that private investors may initially consider too large, while attempting to attract commercial investors as companies mature.
Scheffer wants the EIC to move further in that direction. Under his presidency, its Board has advocated a more ambitious, ARPA-inspired Challenge model, a larger role for the EIC Fund, stronger scale-up financing and closer connections with national and regional innovation programmes. The underlying shift is from projects to portfolios.
A conventional funding programme selects individual proposals and monitors whether they deliver what was promised. A portfolio-based institution begins with a technological or societal objective and brings different projects, companies and forms of expertise together around it. Programme managers do more than administer grants: they identify connections, redirect effort and help technologies move towards application.
Deep tech needs ecosystems, not isolated grants.
The comparison with the American ARPA model is instructive, but incomplete. DARPA operates inside a defence system with a large, concentrated public customer and established pathways from research to procurement. The EIC must organise adoption across fragmented civilian markets, national governments, industrial sectors and regulatory systems.
Europe can imitate active programme management. It cannot import the institutional environment that makes the American model work.
Innovation as strategic capacity
Scheffer’s language reflects a broader European transformation. Deep-tech companies are no longer viewed solely as attractive investments. They can represent future European capacity in energy, health, defence, artificial intelligence, advanced computing and critical materials.
This became particularly visible in a 2026 EIC Board statement on energy resilience. The Board identified almost one hundred EIC-backed companies working across twelve parts of the energy value chain. Yet its recommendations extended beyond additional funding. They included faster permitting, simpler regulation, continuity of capital and stronger industrial demand.
That final condition is crucial. Deep-tech companies need more than investors. They need first buyers.
Strategic public procurement could allow governments, public infrastructure operators, hospitals, defence organisations and utilities to become early customers for European technologies. Without credible demand, companies can demonstrate that a technology works without ever proving that a market exists.
Europe must become the first customer of its own innovation.
The message is revealing: a breakthrough does not become strategically important because it has been invented. It becomes important when Europe can manufacture, purchase, deploy and use it.
This is where Scheffer’s vision connects innovation policy to industrial policy. A grant may produce knowledge. An investment may support a company. But industrial capacity emerges only when technology, capital, infrastructure and demand reinforce one another.
The problem of strategic selection
Scheffer is valued for making this systemic weakness visible. His broad background allows him to connect the worlds of the scientist, entrepreneur, investor, region and policymaker. He also challenges the comfortable assumption that markets will automatically transform European knowledge into European industry.
Yet a more strategic EIC creates its own tensions. Portfolio thinking requires institutions to make judgments about which technologies deserve sustained attention. That raises an unavoidable question: who decides which fields represent Europe’s future?
An excessively cautious institution will continue distributing resources without creating concentration or scale. An excessively directive one risks following political fashion, protecting preferred sectors or overlooking discoveries that do not fit an established mission.
This produces the classic European friction between excellence and cohesion. The strongest deep-tech capabilities are often concentrated in a limited number of universities, regions and industrial clusters. European programmes are simultaneously expected to support the best technological opportunities and distribute innovation capacity more evenly across the continent. Both objectives are legitimate. They do not always point towards the same investment.
Innovation becomes power only when it can be deployed.
There is also an operational problem. The EIC combines grants, equity investments, programme management and ecosystem building within an administrative environment that must remain transparent and publicly accountable. The more actively it attempts to shape markets, the greater the need for technological expertise, rapid decisions and clear responsibility.
Scheffer himself operates within those limits. The EIC Board advises on strategy, work programmes and technological portfolios. It does not independently control all the institutions required to execute that vision. Regulation, procurement, industrial policy and late-stage capital remain divided among the Commission, member states, public banks, investors and regional authorities.
The bridge Europe has not yet built
Scheffer represents an emerging European innovation state: one that does more than finance research and hope that markets complete the journey.
His project is not to replace private investment or entrepreneurial judgment. It is to build the conditions that allow both to operate across longer timelines, greater technological uncertainty and strategic European priorities.
The test is whether the EIC can become a genuine bridge between Europe’s laboratories and its industrial future—or remain an ambitious instrument operating within the very fragmentation it was designed to overcome.
Europe knows how to discover.
Scheffer’s challenge to the continent is whether it is finally prepared to build.
This article is part of The People Shaping Europe, an Altair Media series examining the ideas, ambitions and contradictions behind Europe’s institutional leadership—and the different visions of the continent they are attempting to build.
Credit
Altair Media / OpenAI — based on an official European Commission / EIC portrait
Caption
Michiel Scheffer, President of the European Innovation Council Board, seeks to connect Europe’s scientific strengths with patient capital, industrial adoption and the capacity to scale breakthrough technologies.
