02 — The Fundamental Questions
A problem well defined is half solved
Europe's technological sovereignty raises many questions: capital, talent, infrastructure, market fragmentation, regulation, competition policy, industrial policy, procurement, institutional governance. They converge on five fundamental questions.
Research agenda
Five questions define our work
- Q01
What should technological sovereignty mean?
Should sovereignty be understood as ownership, autonomy, contestability, resilience or technological capability? Which conception provides the most appropriate foundation for Europe's technological strategy?
- Q02
What creates technological capacity?
What combination of capital, talent, infrastructure, energy, markets and public demand enables technological firms to emerge, scale and compete globally?
- Q03
How should political priorities, industrial policy and European law be aligned to enable Europe to develop, scale and control critical technologies?
What governance architecture can coordinate the political, economic and legal dimensions of technological sovereignty so that they reinforce rather than undermine each other?
- Q04
What role should European law play in building it?
Does the growing body of EU technology legislation constitute a coherent legal framework for technological sovereignty? Or has it become a fragmented landscape of overlapping obligations, inconsistent enforcement and barriers to scaling across the internal market?
- Q05
How can Europe reduce its strategic dependencies?
Which legal, economic and institutional choices can turn European regulatory power into technological capacity and genuine strategic autonomy? Should Europe regulate more, regulate less, or regulate differently?
A guiding concept
Strategic Asymmetry
Europe will not achieve technological sovereignty by copying the technological leaders. It will achieve it by identifying and exploiting its own strategic asymmetries.
Across all five questions we therefore ask: how does a latecomer catch up with a leader? When should it imitate, and when should it diverge? Which asymmetric advantages (in talent, data, energy, open models or distributed infrastructure) can European law enable rather than foreclose?