No it’s not the EIT, it’s also not the ERC or the EIP on AHA this is a brand new exciting acronym, the EIC.
The Brussels scientific community has been abuzz with the announcement by EU Commissioner Moedas that 2016 will see the Commission working towards the creation of a one stop shop for innovators in Europe called the European Innovation Council. What does that mean? No idea – and neither does anyone else. But it’s all very exciting.
Cynical writers would say this means one thing and one thing alone – that the term “innovation” as an EU buzzword meaning everything and absolutely nothing at once has finally taken on a life of its own and gotten its own institute.
Those in Brussels long enough grumble that this will be a carbon copy of the European Institute for Innovation and Technology (EIT) set up under Commissioner Moedas’ predecessor and will amount to needless bureaucracy. They may have a point. The EU Institutions’ track record is not exactly 100% in this department next to a similar department. One cannot help but be reminded of how the European Medicines Agency (EMA) dealt with the problem of having too many Committees for it to manage. The solution? To set up a committee to manage the committees that there were too many of.
While this group has potential, in its non-defined form, all we can say for now is that the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
