Strong systems approach needed in EU innovation policy and legislation

Given the key role EU innovation policy will play in achieving the EU’s Green Deal goals, FIPRA International and Tetra Pak jointly hosted a webinar on March 2, featuring a discussion with innovators who shared their diverse experience with the aim of drawing lessons and best practices to help shape policy going forward.

The webinar also showcased the Voices of Innovation campaign launched by Tetra Pak and its partners which pinpoints, from a variety of stakeholder and value chain partner perspectives, how innovation is helping to tackle sustainability challenges facing the food packaging industry – and how innovation and collaboration along the chain can provide solutions. 

To articulate the challenges of bringing innovation to life, the webinar featured:  

• Laurence Mott (Tetra Pak, Executive Vice-President for Development & Engineering). 
• Paul Hofheinz (President and Co-founder of the Lisbon Council). 
• Katrina Sichel (Founder, Wit and Word Communications) who moderated the talk. 

The discussion tackled innovation policy frameworks, what it means today to deliver innovation, the sustainability transformation, the challenges of industrial scaling, ecosystems and partnerships, innovating globally while catering for local needs, the sharing and use of data, and how regulators and stakeholders can work together to deliver on all of these fronts.

Among the key thoughts and ideas reflected was the fact that innovation is not just about technology and inventions; it’s about innovation with a purpose to solve challenges and to create solutions. It is also about better products and services for the benefit of food producers, consumers, and society.

Taking the case of Tetra Pak, innovating and delivering the world’s most sustainable food package – carbon-neutral, fully recyclable and made only from renewable or recycled materials – represents a different, more responsible and complex challenge than creating, say, new functionalities for the consumer.  

Innovation today is not the same as it was. The only way to innovate and overcome the challenges we, as a society, face today is to work in an ecosystem, collaborating across all parts of the value chain at once, and with close and open relationships with suppliers who become partners, as part of a win-win model.

Legislators are part of this ecosystem: good and smart regulation – built around standards and level playing fields that create opportunities – is important and necessary but needs to be co-created from inception with stakeholders.  

A systems approach is needed to deliver the sustainability transformation. Industrial ecosystems are intricate and symbiotic, and making incremental changes to one product or process can have significant knock-on effects on other part of the system.  

Regulation therefore needs to take this system approach, involving stakeholders early on and legislating for co-created outcomes and deliverables. Otherwise, the green transition – the biggest transformation industry will go through – risks being too slow.

Often it is industrial scaling that is a constraint rather than inventing new technology. Industrializing requires a clear plan to roll out enormous programmes across different jurisdictions and requires having the right people with the right skills. These processes start years in advance of deadlines and entail complex and rigorous planning. And all of this has to be achieved without interrupting existing supply or value chains – such as the one that provides us every day with the food and products that we need.

Last but not least: innovation must serve global society. Global companies design their products using global standards. Standards are a critical component in creating a level playing field and well-functioning Single Market (for which the EU can play an essential role).  

So too, data. Sharing data across the value chain and among different stakeholders is needed to ensure that innovation can happen. When shaping legislation, these factors need to be kept in mind.

(Written by Alex Braley and Arnaud Van Dooren)