Building the R&I Agency of the Future

The Insider, Season 2, Episode 5

“Building the R&I Agency of the Future”

Europe is not short on ideas. Over the past decades, it has built world-class universities, produced exceptional science, and developed some of the most advanced policy frameworks in the world.

Yet when it comes to turning knowledge into strategic technologies, industrial strength and long-term innovation capacity, the results remain uneven — especially when compared with countries in East Asia that have managed to preserve and strengthen their institutional foundations.

Why does this gap persist? And what would it take for Europe to rebuild the public-sector capacity that modern innovation systems require?

In this episode of The Insider, Ricardo Miguéis sits down with Rainer Kattel, Deputy Director and Professor of Innovation and Public Governance at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), to explore exactly that.

Over the past 20 years, Kattel has become one of the leading voices on how innovation bureaucracies work, why they fail, and what it means for states to act strategically. His award-winning book How to Make an Entrepreneurial State puts forward a simple but provocative idea: bureaucracy is not the enemy of innovation; it is one of its essential conditions.

The episode unfolds in two parts:

Part 1 – How Europe lost (and others kept) institutional capacity

The conversation begins with an honest look at Europe’s position: a continent that invests heavily in R&I but struggles with implementation. Ricardo and Rainer discuss how, from the 1990s onwards, many European countries gradually hollowed out their strategic capabilities, turning agencies into project managers focused on compliance rather than long-term direction.

Kattel contrasts this with the trajectories of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and other East Asian economies, which built public organisations able to learn continuously, anticipate technological shifts, and act with coherence across decades.

The question they raised seems unavoidable: Can Europe still govern innovation in a world where second chances are disappearing?

Part 2 – What enables real change

The second half of the episode shifts from diagnosis to possibility. What would it take for European governments to actually strengthen their innovation capability, not on paper, but in day-to-day practice?

Rainer outlines the core ingredients: institutions that learn quickly, agencies that operate with a degree of protected autonomy, and political systems that allow experimentation without collapsing into short-termism. He argues that reform is less about redesigning entire ministries and more about creating the spaces (and the incentives) for public organisations to think strategically, coordinate across sectors, and retain the expertise they need.

The discussion also touches on talent, time horizons, and why the public sector’s ability to adapt often depends on the smallest units inside it: the teams empowered to test, adjust and build institutional memory before the next political cycle resets the conversation.

With geopolitical tensions rising and major technological shifts already underway, Europe is rethinking its R&I system for the decade ahead. This episode goes straight to the core question: Can Europe rebuild the institutional capacity it needs to stay competitive (and to govern innovation) in a world that won’t slow down?

A timely episode for a critical moment...

Listen to full episode “Building the R&I Agency of the Future”