Every EU government supports innovation, believing that it will help Europe to meet the numerous economic, social and environmental challenges that it faces.

EU governments are taking increasingly unorthodox measures to prevent the economic crisis from overwhelming their economies. They are right to intervene, but their policies must not undermine Europe's long-term economic growth prospects in the process.

Europeans have long sought to reconcile markets with social solidarity. The EU’s economic reform programme, the Lisbon agenda, falls squarely within this tradition. Launched in 2000, its vaulting ambition was to turn the EU into the “most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010”.