Dear all,
Welcome to you all, to this High-level meeting of the Joint European Forum for IPCEIs.
As my tenure comes to an end, it gives me great pleasure to be here today, to celebrate the great journey of Important Projects of Common European Interest over the past ten years. This has been a shared journey between the Commission and the Member States.
As you know, the concept of Important Projects of Common European Interest was enshrined in the Treaty all along. But for a long time, it was largely left unused. Until 2014, when the Commission adopted its first communication providing Member States with guidance. By doing so, a giant was awakened.
This is not just because IPCEIs provide a framework to fund gigantic infrastructure projects, such as the upcoming Fehmarn Belt Tunnel between my country and Germany.
Since 2018, the Commission has approved 10 integrated IPCEIs in the batteries, hydrogen, microelectronics, cloud edge computing and health value chains. The 10 integrated Projects involve 335 projects from 22 Member States and nearly 250 companies. We approved 37 billion euros of State aid, which are expected to unlock additional 66 billion euros in private investments. In other words, over 100 billion euros in investments to foster the competitiveness of strategic sectors. This is comparable to the entire budget of the EU’s Horizon research programme.
IPCEIs owe their success to certain principles: they support innovation and cooperation, and create spillovers.
First, we support truly innovative or large open infrastructure projects. In sectors where we are already world leaders, but also where we are not, we cannot give up on our innovation ambition. IPCEIs push us to go beyond the state of the art, for a competitive EU industry.
In this respect, IPCEIs aren’t about funding abstract research. IPCEIs fund concrete breakthrough technologies in specific strategic sectors. And IPCEIs can also fund first industrial deployment, such as pilot lines and projects enabling scaling up. In other words, IPCEIs help make our most important technologies ready for mass-production.
Second, what makes IPCEIs truly unique, is that it allows Member States and companies to cooperate in strategic sectors, and to pool resources in one big integrated project. IPCEIs bring great cross-border European collaborations in ambitious research and development and first industrial deployment.
The cooperation concerns both large companies and SMEs. In fact, the share of SMEs participating in IPCEIs has been going up every time: from 7% in the first IPCEI on Microelectronics in 2018, to more than 60% in Med4Cure, the most recent IPCEI on health. Overall, more than 20% of all directly participating companies are SMEs.
And as you know, the collaboration in IPCEIs extends much beyond the direct participants. IPCEIs create an ecosystem of associated and indirect partners, which can also obtain State aid under the General Block Exemption Regulation. So far more than 2,100 indirect and associated partners, predominantly SMEs and research organisations, have benefitted from working with the IPCEIs’ direct participants.
Third, with big money comes big responsibility. IPCEI projects must benefit more than just the companies involved. The aid beneficiaries also must give something back. Through mandatory spillover commitments, the knowledge acquired thanks to State aid must be shared with other companies and research organisations: this is done for instance by granting access to the beneficiaries’ labs, clean rooms, or pilot lines, by mandating licences on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms, or by requiring participation in dedicated events, and through collaborations with universities and research organisations.
And we do all of this while ensuring value for money. Thanks to the thorough assessment performed by DG COMP colleagues, with the help of Member States, we enable the projects to materialise even with a reduction in the amount of public funding provided. Overall, we estimate that the aid amount for IPCEIs approved so far was reduced by 25% on average – in other words, we saved European taxpayers much over 5 billion euros in aid.
Therefore, IPCEIs show that the EU has what it takes to deliver industrial innovation and technological leadership. The IPCEIs and the 100 billion euro of investments that they enable are industrial policy in action, when we decide to collectively channel money and talents, public and private players actors, towards one common project. Which is why IPCEIs have become an essential part of Europe’s competitiveness.
Indeed, perhaps another wonderful testimony to the success of IPCEIs has been the fact that they have been “picked up” in both the Letta and the Draghi reports. Both single out IPCEIs, and recommend an increased use of the instrument in line with evolving EU strategic priorities and the challenges of a changing global landscape. These recommendations have found their way into the President’s Political Guidelines, as well as into the mission letters of EVP Ribera, my successor, and EVP Séjourné.
So going forward, we have two missions. And today’s high-level meeting serves both.
First, we need to identify new areas for IPCEIs. We will be discussing precisely that today, as we hear more about possible IPCEIs to endorse in the sectors of (i) circular advanced materials for clean technologies, (ii) artificial intelligence, (iii) edge computing, and (iv) advanced semiconductor technologies.
Second, we know that we need to make IPCEIs simpler and faster. This is a quest we know all too well. It is not enough to have awakened a giant, the giant needs to be agile!
The good news is we have done a lot already to streamline and simplify the process.
In particular, with our “Green Deal Amendment” of the General Block Exemption Regulation, Member States can support smaller IPCEI-related R&D projects of up to 50 million euros, without needing to notify them. This is a simpler route for SMEs. But of course, it is also practical for the Commission, which has fewer projects to assess, while the smaller projects are “associated” and still belong to the ecosystem created by an IPCEI.
Also, we have published a Code of Good Practices, and templates for data collection, all made available on a dedicated IPCEI website. By recommending working methods and increasing uniformity, we guide Member States and companies and speed up the process.
And of course, we created the Joint European Forum – which brings us all together here.
In its first year of operation, the JEF has managed to create a space for the Commission and the Member States to work together, to ensure that all Member States can participate and are regularly informed about ongoing initiatives. It is where we work together on identifying new projects, on enabling a smoother design process, and on further streamlining assessment and implementation. For instance, a dedicated working group has come with a recommendation defining the role of “associated” and “indirect” partners in IPCEIs.
And we have not run out of ideas on how to improve the IPCEI process. Indeed, there are already pending tasks, related in particular to the early phases of an IPCEI. First, DG COMP is working on a standardised template to explain the overall eligibility of an IPCEI, which will accelerate drafting by Member States.
Second, we are working on technical guidance to help companies crystallise their decision-making on whether to apply for an IPCEI, in national calls for expression of interest.
Third, in the context of the upcoming second Health IPCEI – called “Tech4cure” –, we are testing an increased involvement of the Commission in assisting Member States and companies during the design phase of an IPCEI.
Ultimately, what the Letta and Draghi reports tell us is that, in a changing and ever-more challenging world, we will succeed together, or fail individually.
This is precisely what IPCEIs are about: they are about collaborating and working together, to push frontiers, to the benefit of our competitiveness and more broadly of our societies. Having seen the willingness and dedication of all those involved in the JEF-IPCEI, to free up resources and to prioritise this work, I am confident that we will succeed together.
Source – EU Commission