If Europe wants to be a front-runner in deeptech (which includes AI) it’ll need a workforce that can turn that ambition into reality. The problem is, despite being home to a significant number of top 100 research institutions, that knowledge isn’t always making the leap from lab to industry.
“In Europe, we want to remain competitive, and we want fast growth, innovative companies to come out of Europe,” says Martin Kern, the director of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), an independent body of the EU established in 2008 to strengthen Europe’s ability to innovate.
“The ideas are there, the scientific basis is there, but unless we have the talent we will not turn them into our competitive advantages. That’s why it’s so important to close this skills gap,” he adds.
According to McKinsey, the tech talent gap in the 27 EU countries could be as large as 3.9m by 2027, resulting in economic losses of as much as €600bn if it’s not closed.
In October 2022, the EIT threw its weight behind this problem, launching the EIT Deep Tech Talent Initiative. Here’s how it’s using it.
Connecting the dots
So far, the EIT Deep Tech Talent Initiative, with 388 member organisations, has trained more than 500k people through courses. They provide education on deeptech subjects to both students and professionals looking to upskill or reskill.
“The idea is to create an inclusive ecosystem that brings together not just the universities that do [this] already, but also training providers and industry leaders,” says Kern. Pledging organisations range from universities such as the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, technological parks such as TecnoCampus in Spain and incubators such as Commercialization Reactor in Latvia, which can leverage the EIT’s Europe-wide audience to scale their programmes.
Training is the way to elicit the innovation needs of companies.
While some courses are aimed at high school and undergraduate level learners — such as the EIT’s Girls Go Circular online learning programme, which trained more than 40k school girls in 2024 and is being integrated into the EIT Deep Tech Talent Initiative — other programmes focus on bridging the gap between startups and innovative research, helping more companies to increase their competitiveness through the integration of technologies like AI.
“Training is the way to elicit the innovation needs of companies,” says Domenico Maria Caprioli, the scientific director at yourscienceEDU, which trains decision makers on deeptech subjects to help them adopt new technologies. The company has provided more than 5,000 hours of deeptech training since it was founded in 2021.
“We use training to enable [the companies] to ask for innovation — because otherwise, the demand for innovation will be driven by media and funding trends,” Caprioli says.
Another EIT Deep Tech Talent Initiative pledger, MinnaLearn, provides courses on AI aimed at people with non-technical backgrounds. The plan is to help companies, and their employees, become more productive by integrating AI into their workflows.
According to McKinsey, AI spending by Western European corporates lags their US counterparts by an average of 30% across all sectors.
The first step is to give a basic understanding of what AI is and what it isn’t.
MinnaLearn’s customers include Janssen, the pharmaceuticals company, and GroupM, the world’s largest media buying agency. GroupM has trained more than 100 staff in its Polish office through MinnaLearn’s programmes, says MinnaLearn CEO Ville Valtonen, creating 28 AI experiments in the process that could boost productivity.
“AI is something that all of us already use in our daily lives,” says Valtonen. “The first step is to give a basic understanding of what AI is and what it isn’t. We don’t teach people to be programmers or data scientists, but we [give] them the tools to talk with people who are. That’s the issue in many companies, they hire people with a technical background and people without, and these people don’t have a common language.”
The deeptech talent ripple effect
In turn, such training will also be beneficial for startups looking for customers willing to take a punt on their innovative solutions.
Startups, which are often more agile than large corporates, can serve as early adopters for cutting-edge technologies, helping to further validate their business models and invest to meet expectations of multinational corporates, who often have stringent requirements.
We can deliver if we all go in the same direction.
“When you’re a startup, even if your product is very, very good, you won’t be a candidate validated by a corporate because you don’t have three to five years of accounting. This is the day-to-day reality,” explains Olivier Zephir, head of business development and innovation at Luxembourg’s Technoport Business Incubator, which has been supporting startups looking to commercialise for more than two decades and is also pledged to the EIT Deep Tech Talent Initiative.
“You have tech transfer from the lab into testing markets, but then to scale from off-the-lab to market proofing, this is the key [challenge],” Zephir says.
While Europe is often characterised as moving too slow for tech companies’ liking, Kern points to the speed at which the EIT Deep Tech Talent Initiative has boosted the deeptech talent pool by more than half a million people in just two years as proof that “if there is a willingness, and the right incentives and programmes available, we can move fast”.
“We can deliver if we all go in the same direction,” says Kern.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/europe-deeptech-talent-gap-eit-brnd/
