10 years of European science, research and innovation performance, 10 years of Invest Europe data

For a decade, the European Commission’s Science, Research and Innovation Performance (SRIP) report has tracked one of Europe’s most persistent challenges: turning world-class ideas into world-class companies. Throughout that period, Invest Europe data has helped policymakers understand the role private capital plays in making that happen.

The European Commission has just published its 2026 SRIP report, marking 10 years since the first edition appeared in 2016. Much has changed over that period: the language, the geopolitical context and the role assigned to investment in Europe’s innovation story.

Europe’s innovation challenge is also an investment challenge

Across successive editions, the focus has expanded from research excellence and commercialisation to competitiveness, the green and digital transitions, resilience and technology sovereignty. By 2026, two dedicated chapters address financing and scaling innovation and how to promote access to finance to deliver on innovation.

This reflects a growing recognition that the journey from laboratory to global market does not stop when an innovation is commercialised. Companies need capital to develop products, hire people, enter new markets, build production capacity and compete internationally. Innovative companies, particularly those developing new, complex or higher-risk technologies, often cannot finance that journey through conventional sources alone.

Tracking Europe’s financing gap, and what comes next

Invest Europe has contributed evidence to this debate throughout the history of SRIP, a relationship that predates the SRIP name itself, including its predecessor, the European Commission’s Innovation Union Competitiveness Report.

Across subsequent SRIP editions, our data has been used to examine questions ranging from the size of Europe’s venture capital market and the financing gap with the United States to fundraising, fund sizes, investment stages and the sources of capital backing European funds.

The 2026 edition continues that relationship. Invest Europe data feeds into the Commission’s analysis of some of the most important questions now facing European policymakers: how much institutional capital reaches venture capital, what role pension funds and insurers play, why allocations differ across European markets, and how more long-term European savings can be mobilised towards innovation.

10 years ago, venture capital was often discussed as evidence of Europe’s financing gap. Today, private capital is increasingly recognised as part of the solution. Europe cannot build leadership in artificial intelligence, biotech and healthcare, cleantech, defence, and other strategic sectors through public funding alone. And this means creating the conditions in which pension funds, insurers and other long-term investors can invest in European private capital, ensuring public funding crowds in rather than crowds out private investment, removing unnecessary barriers to cross-border investment, and giving innovative businesses a Single Market in which they can scale, throughout the full financing journey.

As the policy debate moves increasingly from innovation to investment and scale, Invest Europe will continue to help ensure that the role of private capital is not only understood and measured, but reflected in the solutions Europe puts in place.