Introduction to the INTEC 2024 report
MIT researcher Susan Solomon was part of the scientific team that travelled to Antarctica in 1986 to gather the data that would provide definitive proof that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were more effective at destroying ozone there than anywhere else on the planet. A year earlier, the British Antarctic Survey had sounded the alarm by publishing a scientific paper claiming that an unexpected "hole" had formed in the ozone layer over its station. The world reacted amazingly swiftly and effectively to the call of science and in 1987 the Montreal Protocol was signed, setting out the conditions for the protection of the ozone layer, in what is arguably the greatest international environmental success story. When, almost 40 years later, Susan Solomon looks back on that feat, in which scientific knowledge was able to mobilise a sensational regulatory response and technological innovation, she also pours out the valuable lessons learned. "When it came to solving the ozone problem, we were helped by an ideal confluence of what I call the three Phad deeply personal health impacts, its science was easily discernible to non-experts, and the solutions were eminently practical," he writes. The scientific cause benefited from "a powerful momentum caused by consumer action to move away from CFCs in aerosol cans in the US, a personal choice that destroyed the US CFC market and made our producers eager to seek alternatives". It made people feel "empowered and interested", he says. Technology-oriented policies under the Montreal Protocol went where individuals could not, and inspired the innovation needed to solve problems where consumers had less coercive power, such as refrigeration and air conditioning. "People are much better at solving hot crises than dealing with slow crises. Public fascination kept scientists energised and politicians well motivated to act," says Solomon. That was a success story in a task that today has become imperative in our societies and economies, especially in Europe: moving from problem identification to action.
It is the time of the brave", said the director of the Rafael del Pino Foundation's Chair in Science and Society, the scientist and entrepreneur Javier García, at the presentation of the book "The time of the brave". Innovation with a future which contains the contents of the INTEC 2023 report. The Kyoto Protocol is not achieving the same success as the Montreal Protocol. Circumstances today are different from those in which the battle against the ozone hole was fought. We are witnessing the confluence of multiple scientific-technological revolutions on a scale never known before, in areas such as energy generation, distribution and storage, new sustainable materials and the circular economy, digital transformation, semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous systems, the conquest of space, decarbonisation and talent management. There are also similarities: the environment of the 1980s was dominated by a division of the world into blocks, even more antagonistic than today's, and was overshadowed by the threat of war. But the problem of the ozone hole cannot compare in complexity with the concerted, multi-sectoral and multi-polar action required to combat climate change.
There is, however, a further differential factor, of enormous qualitative value, resulting from a structural, not cyclical, change in the way in which knowledge is managed in the world today. Forty years ago, it was possible to produce a unified response to the scientific challenge thanks to the balance between initiative and ownership of the knowledge that served as the basis for technological innovation. Today that balance has been broken. The leadership of Western countries is no longer such, and alternatives have emerged, especially China, which condition the concerted strategies. The new options come not only from states, but also from large corporations that are promoting new paths of innovation and exploration that challenge the capacity to articulate the great objectives of humanity, from the conquest of space to the exploitation of the moon, the monitoring of the planet or the new applications of generative AI, around forums of international agreement. It is illustrative to follow the stock market evolution of technology giants since the middle of the last decade, when the design of their algorithms went from being defined by the quality of service to users of their social networks, content aggregators and marketplaces to being defined by financial objectives. Producers of generative AI applications may be next. The public sector has never been more dependent on knowledge generated by the private sector. Moving from ideas to action risks moving from being a general-purpose driver to a strategy of geostrategic differentiation and market competition.
In the COVID-19 crisis itself, the fragmentation of the knowledge world into blocs and the inability to act in a fully coordinated manner became clear. The militarisation of the economy is contributing to this fragmentation dynamic. At the last BIO Convention, the most important event of the year for the global biotechnology sector, the need to guarantee US national security in the face of possible biological threats was very much on the agenda. The US government has an ongoing partnership with BIO to collaborate on issues ranging from identifying gaps in early warning systems to identifying and monitoring threats and developing and delivering solutions. Health and security technologies are increasingly intertwined. At SPIE Defence + Commercial Sensing, a senior US Defence official, Dev Shenoy, proclaimed that "microelectronics underpins all military systems capabilities", and noted that "AI must be transformative for defence" because information technologies have become "a mission-critical warfare system".
In the midst of the race against climate change, the world now invests almost twice as much in clean energy as in fossil fuels, but there are significant imbalances in that investment. Emerging market and developing economies, excluding China, account for only about 15% of global clean energy spending. In the United States, investment was projected to exceed $300 billion in 2024, 1.6 times the 2020 level and well above the amount invested in fossil fuels. The European Union spends $370 billion on clean energy, while China will have committed almost $680 billion by 2024, backed by its large domestic market and the rapid growth of the so-called "new three" industries: solar cells, lithium battery production and electric vehicle manufacturing.
Nothing is more symptomatic than what is happening in the exciting technology race for nuclear fusion. In October 2023, the UK, which had broken the world record for energy generated from fusion in 2021, launched its Towards Fusion Energy 2023 programme; the following spring, Japan followed suit; and in June 2024, the US, after signing partnerships with both countries, unveiled its Fusion Energy Strategy 2024, which it described as a roadmap "unique in the world". 80% of the more than $6 billion invested so far in this exciting journey has gone to US fusion companies. Fusion has become a global race for the US Department of Energy, but Ambrogio Fasoli, appointed earlier this year as head of EUROfusion, is warning that the pace of development of ITER, the European research centre that pioneered the world in this field, is irritatingly slow and that Europe must redouble its efforts to position itself in fusion energy. In another key technological field, the mastery of data and the software and hardware for collection, storage, processing and distribution, one figure sums up the reality of the current state of digital transformation: the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, one of the three largest supercomputers in Europe, has 4,500 NVIDIA Hopper chips, the most powerful in AI today; Meta has 350,000.
Moving from ideas to action, following Solomon's methodology, involves identifying and internalising the consequences of not doing so, explaining the problem and solutions well and comprehensibly, and promoting practical measures. Today, it could be argued that the other major obstacle, alongside fragmentation, militarisation and global polarisation, is the enormous challenge of getting people to be "empowered and interested" in common goals, whether or not science is involved in shaping them. In the drive to transform the production model, we should not place all the responsibility on ideas. The greatest guarantee of the success of a proposal is to ensure that it becomes a social demand, and on this point there is still a long way to go in free societies. The absence of state authority to impose change through coercion and constraint is countered in Western countries by the difficulty of establishing constructive dialogue with respect for difference, something that is putting the very concept of democracy at risk. The Enlightenment is running out of battery power. The rise of populism, of strictly short-termist visions, of extremism, accentuated by social networks, turn the remains of the old proclamations for equality, fraternity and freedom into a repository of bitter memes.
Interesting research demonstrates the extent to which the codification of technical knowledge in the vernacular was key to countries absorbing the technologies of the Industrial Revolution. Comparative advantage shifted to industries that could benefit from patents, in countries and colonies that had access to codified know-how, and did not reach the rest of the regions to the same extent. Japan managed to ride this wave of transformation when its government codified the know-how available in Germany in 1870. As a result, it was unique among non-Western countries in successfully industrialising during the first wave of globalisation. The shared codification of those days is presented as a beautiful analogy, now the tower of Babel is falling apart.
Mario Draghi's report on "The future of Europe's competitiveness" has a B-side with an "In-depth analysis and recommendations". It proposes a sort of codification of the key sectors for innovation: energy, critical raw materials, high-capacity and high-speed broadband networks, digitalisation and advanced technologies, computing and artificial intelligence, semiconductors, energy-intensive industries, clean technologies, automotive, defence, space, pharmaceuticals and transport. It could be interpreted as a taxonomy of the most relevant economic sectors. The vision is no longer product-based (textiles, ceramics, furniture...), but rather the focus is shifted to enabling technologies (all those related to digital components and the ICT world) and to the major aggregators of products and services, among which we find strident absences such as health, infrastructure and agri-food. The key is that Europe is not a leader in any of the relevant areas included in Draghi's list of sectors, according to a report by Digital Europe. In advanced semiconductors, Europe is 45% behind global best practice; in the case of AI, it is just 53%; in health biotechnologies and quantum computing the gap with global best practice is also substantial, at just 57%; energy technologies are four points above, but only reach 61% of the global top; in space technologies and additive manufacturing Europe is at 69% of the top development; the best result is in advanced connectivity (71%).
In his wake-up call on our particular ground-breaking ozone holeDraghi says the EU's gap in digital and advanced technologies can affect the functioning of other sectors and calls for "significant and targeted policy actions". Even the EU's comparative advantage in digital and greens is being increasingly challenged as China is catching up, and its number of patents is rising rapidly. "EU innovation activities are mainly concentrated in sectors with medium to low R&D intensity," which "could push the EU into a 'medium technology trap'," the report says. Over the past two decades, the top three EU companies have consistently belonged to the automotive sector and have shown minimal changes in their rankings. It is debatable whether the best way to alleviate this worrying drift is a new public spending injection campaign (800 billion euros of investment per year), a European model for boosting R&D that avoids national, regional and local fragmentation (calling into question the entire network of institutions and infrastructures that have been developed over the last three decades under the previous model), better mechanisms for boosting innovation through public demand, and a commitment to research centres of excellence. Alternatives to the solution proposed by Draghi may be put forward, but the goal is clear: Europe and Spain must regain technological sovereignty and leadership not only in frontier science, but also in the translation of their findings into technology.
It is time to move from ideas to action, it is time to work with the "high beams", another of the images Javier García often uses. This means acting quickly and more efficiently. "In Spain there is no single institution dedicated to productivity," says the OECD in its report analysing the situation in our country. One of the big problems with the slow growth of labour productivity is that it is concentrated in the companies and regions that lag furthest behind in terms of technological development and, therefore, "coincides with the deepening of economic inequalities", he adds. While the top 5% of the most productive firms in Spain, the so-called frontier firms, show "healthy" labour productivity growth (around 2% per year on average), comparable to other OECD countries, labour productivity growth among the so-called lagging firms "has been considerably reduced". The pattern is similar for regions, and arguably for citizens by extension. Productivity is Spain's CFC.
As every year, the INTEC report aims to serve as a reference for decision-making, to move from ideas to action, in the areas identified by the members of the committee of experts of the Chair in Science and Society, among which are prominent representatives of the world of science and economics. It is a call for hope because it is based on the identification of areas of opportunity in Spain, whether for the resolution of social and economic problems, or for the deepening of areas in which our research and business fabric has reached levels of excellence or diversification towards new horizons of growth based on technology and innovation. The chapter dedicated to analysing water management in agriculture is more relevant than ever, because Spain is a land of innovators in this field and faces a complicated water scenario in the future.
It was necessary to explore the possibilities that AI opens up in two crucial areas for our future. In the case of the Spanish language, technology cannot become a factor of distancing and cultural discrimination, in which a certain linguistic singularity is imposed without considering all the richness of our language and the different local and regional expressions. It is necessary to intervene in the training mechanisms of the new extended language models (LLM) and to take the initiative in their implementation. The second AI issue addressed in the report could not be more critical for the expert committee: education. In the current dynamic of knowledge concentration in major hubs of excellence, education systems must be equipped with the most effective tools to enhance the education of the population if they are to guarantee equal opportunities. We are witnessing one of the greatest crises in the availability of talent in history - there has probably never been one like it, and this is an indisputable issue.
The conquest of space is similar to what happened four decades ago at the beginning of the connectivity race that led to the internet. Spain demonstrated an admirable ability to position itself in the telecommunications sector and has a highly competitive business fabric in satellite technology. But the change taking place now is on an unprecedented scale. PLD Space's success in becoming the first European startup capable of sending a rocket into space should serve as motivation to push the launcher field forward, and there is an urgent need to strategically position itself in the market for mega satellite constellations which, beyond the controversial aspects that need to be addressed for their safe deployment, will act as the world's essential new communications network.
Spain is taking very interesting initiatives in the field of new alternative fuels to fossil fuels, both those that come from waste and those that can be produced in a completely green way, such as methanol. In both cases, there are certainties that allow us to think of a progressive implementation in the market, even if initially in specific activity niches such as maritime traffic or land transport fleets. One of the major vectors of change will be aviation, a sector in which Spain has an enormous industrial presence and a long history of innovation. From 2035, the aircraft we know today will begin to be replaced by others that are much more sustainable, both in terms of fuel and materials. This is one of the great technological races of the moment, with many unknowns still to be resolved.
The INTEC report always reserves a special section for health-related technologies, which are directly involved in improving people's living conditions and well-being. After the success of its application in vaccines, it is worth following closely the evolution of CRISPR-related technologies and all the opportunities that are opening up for Spain in this field. There is also growing interest among researchers in the possibilities associated with the re-emergence of phages as an alternative to chemical medication to combat the most resistant viruses. Other societies have entered into this debate in depth, and ours should not be left on the sidelines.
This work therefore goes beyond being a call to action. Although the phrase "let others innovate" is attributed to Henry Ford, it has become a commonplace to be avoided in our country, a kind of disillusionment about our own possibilities that evidence discredits on closer examination. Of course we can innovate ourselves. In fact, this work not only proposes to take action, following Susan Solomon's indications, if you will, but also offers ways and keys to do so in accordance with our needs and available talent.