According to Sifted, Europe faces a stubborn “innovation-to-scale” gap in healthtech, where breakthroughs born in its universities often get manufactured and adopted in the US or Asia first. A survey by the European Round Table for Industry found 76% of top CEOs reported “no impact” from recent EU competitiveness reforms. Catalonia, however, shows a different path, with its ecosystem of about 155 AI-health companies raising a record €350 million, credited to a culture of continuous exchange. EIT Health, an EU-backed network, has supported nearly 3,000 startups since 2016 and its ventures saw investment skyrocket from €27.9m in 2017 to €408.7m in 2022. Meanwhile, a petition by France Digitale, signed by over 100 leaders, is demanding a unified EU framework for evaluating digital health tools to cut through the red tape of 27 different markets.
The Collaboration Imperative
Here’s the thing: Europe isn’t lacking smart people or good ideas. It’s lacking connected systems. The article really hammers home that the secret sauce isn’t just funding, it’s the network. Catalonia’s success, detailed in reports from Biocat, isn’t about one superstar company; it’s about 100+ startups and scaleups thriving because industry, academia, and health providers actually talk to each other. Rossana Alessandrello from Catalonia’s AQuAS puts it perfectly: innovators need to design with “the value to the patients and their healthcare systems in mind from the start.” That sounds obvious, right? But it only happens through constant conversation, not in a lab silo.
The 27-Market Problem
And this is where it gets messy for a startup. Imagine you invent a brilliant digital therapy. In France, the health authority might accept your clinical study. In Germany? They might reject the exact same data. In another country, there might be no formal evaluation path at all. It’s a fragmentation nightmare. So the push for a unified EU framework, like the one outlined in a framework paper coordinated by EIT Health, is a huge deal. It’s a practical reform that could actually let innovators think “Europe” as a single market from day one, instead of navigating a costly, time-consuming patchwork.
Beyond the Grant Trap
Funding is another classic European bottleneck. Public grants get the science going, but then what? You need to pivot from scientist to CEO, convincing private investors your prototype is a viable business. Graham Armitage from EIT Health notes that EU co-investment schemes help, but you still need the skills to woo those investors. This is where the educator role becomes critical. EIT Health’s training, praised in the Horizon Europe mid-term evaluation, isn’t just about R&D; it’s about building commercial acumen. The result? A 14-fold increase in investment attracted by their supported ventures in five years. That’s not a fluke.
Can Europe Connect the Dots?
So, what’s the verdict? The pieces are all there: deep science, some successful blueprints like Catalonia’s Innovation Access Programme (PASS), and growing demand for reform. The real skill, as Armitage says, is “the ability to build relationships.” It’s a soft skill, but it’s the hard requirement. Can Europe systematize that connection-making? Can it turn its scientific excellence into default commercial success? The appetite is clearly there, both from innovators and from health systems wanting interoperable solutions. But the continent’s final diagnosis is still pending. The potential is massive, but until the networks are as strong as the inventions, Europe will keep exporting its best healthtech ideas.
