Innovation and Cohesion Policies in the context of Global Competition: towards a European “Venture Commons”

This paper focuses on factors triggering break-through and disruptive innovations, notably deeptech, which crucially depend upon the development of entrepreneurial ecosystems (EES). The later are made of complementary players building and sharing a common pool of resources. These pools highlight place-based economies of scale as the interpersonal networks aimed at sharing information and knowledge, fixed cost of physical infrastructures, and capabilities to attract and re-allocate capital result into decreasing entrepreneurial cost as the number of projects/stakeholders increases. The resulting strong economies of agglomeration translate into a quasi-“power law” distribution characterizing EESs at the global level: a small number of EES concentrate most successful innovation ventures, and a large set of EESs lag in terms of capabilities to innovate. We link this phenomenon to the crucial role of venture capital and its ability to generate “venture commons” within EES, suspecting the existence of strong economies of scale and scope in the funding of entrepreneurial ventures. We derive recommendations for the EU innovation policy.