Welcome to Outside the Box: Innovative Ideas from CEPS Ideas Lab, the podcast series that brings you the most forward-thinking ideas from CEPS' annual Ideas Lab event.
Every year, CEPS’ Ideas Lab brings together a diverse group of policymakers, experts, and thought leaders to explore innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges. From digital sovereignty and AI to climate change, energy transition, and sustainable trade, each episode dives into the ideas that are being debated, discussed, and developed at ideas Lab to address the complex issues facing our global society.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Welcome to Outside the Box: Innovative Ideas from CEPS Ideas Lab, the podcast series that brings you the most forward-thinking ideas from CEPS' annual Ideas Lab event.
Every year, CEPS’ Ideas Lab brings together a diverse group of policymakers, experts, and thought leaders to explore innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges. From digital sovereignty and AI to climate change, energy transition, and sustainable trade, each episode dives into the ideas that are being debated, discussed, and developed at ideas Lab to address the complex issues facing our global society.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In a time of increasingly pervasive digital technologies and the gradual disruption of the multilateral order, policymakers have at least one certainty – every single country needs a sovereign digital infrastructure encompassing compute resources, a resilient supply chain for semiconductors, secure digital identity and digital payment platforms, a well-functioning data layer for a variety of industrial and social uses, and abundant cloud and edge computing nodes. All of these will contribute to propelling the digital transformation forward, from government to large factories, all the way to connected objects.
Such infrastructure is becoming the central nervous system of our economy, as crucial as electricity, transport or water networks. It’s also increasingly crucial to make democracy work. Not having a well-developed digital technology stack condemns a country to economic decline and technological dependency, and a future at the mercy of foreign governments and private actors.
For Europe, this will be an uphill battle as we’ve accumulated many delays in key layers of the technology stack. We massively depend on less than a fistful of US cloud operators. Our supply of semiconductors craves rare earths that are quasi-monopolised by China. We are dwarfed by other global powers when it comes to AI, cyber-security solutions and overall Research and Innovation (R&I) spending in the complex new technologies that compose the stack.
We train busloads of leading tech researchers and yet we see so many of them leaving to make their fortune on other shores. And even when we do act, fragmentation, ineffective regulation and fruitless competition further hamper our efforts, depriving our businesses of the scale and support they need to thrive. We have known this for a long time – and we’ve repeatedly called for bold action.
The Draghi report was just the latest wake-up call. A call for urgent, bold measures. And there’s really no time to lose.
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