"You promised me colonies on Mars; instead, I received Facebook." With this statement Buzz Aldrin expressed his disappointment at a present that resembles a worsened version of our immediate past.

Asier Alea Castaños*

From the Earth to the Moon.

"You promised me colonies on Mars; instead, I received Facebook." With this statement, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin expressed his disappointment at a present that resembles a worsened version of our immediate past. More than 1 billion people still have no electricity, millions lack clean water and the climate is changing rapidly with no response on the horizon. "Why can't we respond to the big challenges anymore?" MIT launched, just a few months ago, this question on the cover of the  "Technology Review", in which the frustration expressed by Aldrin gained even more strength in the midst of the covid crisis. The capacity of humanity to solve big problems is there, the speed of development of vaccines proves it, but something has happened when in recent decades investment and efforts have been redirected to other tasks. And this may change, at the stroke of a crisis.

A brave new world.

Technologists seem to have diverted their work by producing and enriching themselves with trivial toys. There is talk of a scarcity of true innovation, of disruptive technologies. Silicon Valley, financial markets, the incentive system that venture capital provides in setting up new companies, or the approach of listed companies in a three-month race to demonstrate financial benefits, do not seem to have been aligned with the big challenges. They have moved sources of funding away from transformation initiatives that do not possess an obvious immediate return and have instead frequently acted as promoters of projects that generate superfluous gimmics with rapid returns. Intuitively, a correlation is perceived between the renunciation of facing the great challenges and the concentration of economic resources in developing proposals of lower social return but high playful component.

The wolf of Wall Street.

Let's do this simple exercise: first, account for the top 20 IPOs in each decade on the three major stock markets, NYSE, Nasdaq and LSE, over the past 30 years. Then, divide the number of workers that made up each company by the IPO value and, finally, make the average employees/market capitalization per decade. The end result, no surprise here, is a downward pattern in the ratio of company valuation and job creation, decade after decade. The sample is not statistically significant, I admit, but it supports what intuition points out.

Back to the future.

The current crisis in which the world is immersed will ironically mean an acceleration of a transformation that was already latent. The convergence of communication technologies, with new energy systems (renewables, hydrogen and efficiency), new digital manufacturing methods or the progressive technological hybridization in areas such as agri-food will give rise to this revolution. The future has been delayed because other tasks have been encouraged, but this economic transformation will come, whoever the final ecosystems are. That's why it's time to position yourself now.

Holidays in Rome.

The industrial strength of the Old Continent lies precisely in those sectors capable of responding to the great challenges. Emerging advances in areas such as energy, food, life sciences, mobility, environment or communication will transform our economy and society. And it has been in times of crisis that the shared economic and social vision that is Europe today has been forged. We find ourselves like Adenauer, Monnet, Schuman and Gasperi, in the need to reformulate, at the end of a crisis, our economy and our society.

The usual suspects.

A test of simple cotton, the truly transformative projects of the Next Generation EU initiative, will be those linked to responding to great challenges. If Europe wants to lead the future, and our corner of the continent wants to use this moment of profound change to re-evolve our industrial fabric as we have done in previous crises, we have to develop a formula of public-private partnership that allows us to accommodate lasting strategies and objectives: To be competitive, first by selecting and promoting industrial sectors of high added value, with a long-term planning horizon. Secondly: coherence and risk. Not by choosing a group of companies and subsidizing them, but by building ecosystem wickers, helping projects that promote evolutionary leaps, on existing capabilities and, always, with a global vision.

Europe, Europe.

Rousseau said that when problems are really important, we would rather be wrong than have no answer. That is why it is vital to respond to the current crisis and occupy that space, to take risks even if mistakes are made. Either the empty future that remains without proposals will be occupied by populisms or dynamics that come beyond Europe. The process of European integration was initiated to preserve the well-being and future of Europe. The founding fathers of the European Union created an economic space, a plan for the growth of industrial sectors of the future... And, above all, a story for the continent. Right now the world that promised sustained well-being is broken and our society can move towards greater levels of inequality. We must focus on sectors of the real economy that provide answers to these challenges. That is also the story. Our future, the future of the next generations in Europe, must be manufactured. Literally.

*Asier Alea Castaños. Director of Global Development of the Basque Culinary Center. Degree in Economics and International Relations. MSc Political Economy and MBA. Boston University, University of Oxford and MIT.