Innovation, Digitization & Structural Change

Against the backdrop of the current debate about phasing out the internal combustion engine (ICE) in Germany and in order to observe where the industry is heading, job advertisements are analyzed that provide insights into the ongoing strategic shifts in the automotive sector.

Low market integration is a key barrier to European competitiveness in the digital economy. International collaboration of knowledge workers could help realize market size advantage. European digital single market policymaking should address production-side barriers.

A quarter of employees in Germany regularly work from home (WFH), which is often a mixture of office and remote working. The office market in this country is undergoing a stress test and the steady shift to WFH will significantly reduce demand for office space in the long term.

Companies in the EU spend much less on R&D than their competitors in the US and focus their innovation activities on mid-tech rather than high-tech sectors (IT hard-ware, software, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals). Reforms of EU innovation policy are necessary to avoid the “mid-tech trap,” i.e., the traditional dominance of the same companies, especially from the automotive sector.

Both Germany and the US are among the most innovative and entrepreneurially ac-tive countries in the world. Nevertheless, they face different challenges: the strengthening of incremental innovative entrepreneurship in Germany versus the continuous promotion of radical and disruptive entrepreneurship in the US.