The damning report released by auditors last week on the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) was predictable. Since it was conceived about 10 years ago, the EIT — a €3-billion (US$3.4-billion) mechanism that is supposed to stimulate innovation in areas that are considered to be among Europe’s foremost societal challenges — has suffered more than just teething problems (see page 291).

As the auditors pointed out, the EIT has struggled to align business and research communities in sectors such as public health or the development of clean technologies in a way that could address common market failures. The EIT as a whole has still to prove that its existence makes a real difference. To do so, managers must monitor more closely — and demonstrate more plausibly — whether the substantial tax money spent on the EIT triggers the desired effects on innovation.

Creating commercially relevant knowledge through basic research needs incentives. But innovation is not something that technocrats (or bureaucrats) can easily order. Innovation and bureaucracy are in fact not a good match — too much of the latter is one of the reasons why the EIT has failed to meet expectations.

The audit report comes as proposals swirl for yet another European Union innovation body — one to be called the European Innovation Council. The idea might seem inappropriate at a time when top-down approaches to stimulate absent market forces have been weighed and found wanting.

But the EIT’s failure is a good occasion to think about what is missing. It’s a given that the EU needs to unlock its innovative potential to make its ageing societies fit for the future and create jobs for the next generation. So why are the EU’s economic competitors in North America and Asia more able to transform the ideas of academic scientists and engineers into marketable goods and services?

It is not for want of good intent and trying. European universities have long ceased to be academic havens where students and staff ponder the wonders of the world in splendid isolation. Science parks, incubators and technology-transfer offices have become the rule on European campuses. Also, the European Commission’s €80-billion Horizon 2020 research programme has a strong emphasis on producing applicable science in partnership with small and large companies. Other schemes — EU Finance for Innovators, Joint Technology Initiatives, European Innovation Partnerships and the EU Innovation Union — likewise intend to obtain the maximum economic return on research money. And yet the quality in question is in short supply. Why hasn’t the investment and effort led to greater innovation?

The byzantine complexity of the EU’s innovation support is making it less effective than policymakers would like it to be. There are just too many programmes, too many levels, too many forms, bodies, requirements and exceptions. The bureaucratic confusion is not stifling innovation all together — the EU’s graphene flagship project and countless small entrepreneurial success stories are sufficient evidence that some things do work very well. But given the EIT dilemma, Europe’s leading research universities have rightly reminded policymakers that streamlining and simplifying EU innovation instruments is a better approach to stimulating the sought-after quality than adding another layer of complexity on top of it.

This does not mean that a European Innovation Council — for which the European Commission issued a call for ideas in February — would necessarily be wasted money. But such a council must seek to optimize, rather than add to, the existing portfolio of initiatives and mechanisms. Europe’s paradoxical innovation bureaucracy might still benefit from a high-level advisory body comprising competent business leaders, researchers and policy experts. So, incidentally, might the floundering EIT.