The Confederación Española de Organizaciones Empresariales (CEOE) has presented a “Decalogue of measures to drive R&D in Spain”. Luis Fernando Álvarez-Gascón, General Manager of GMV’s Secure e-Solutions sector and Vice President of CEOE’s Research and Development Committee, in representation of the Spanish Association of Electronics, Digital Contents and ICT Companies (Asociación de Empresas de Electrónica, Tecnologías de la Información, Telecomunicaciones y Contenidos Digitales; AMETIC), has collaborated in drawing up the document.

This document springs from CEOE’s conviction that Spain needs to up its R&D and digitization effort in order to boost its competitiveness. During the presentation of the “Decalogue of measures to drive R&D in Spain”, CEOE’s president, Juan Rosell, pointed out that “R&D is a top priority and should always feature on the political agenda”.

This Decalogue aims to be food for thought, setting out the main reasons why R&D should be a priority for Spain; over and above that, however, it is also an action blueprint, suggesting specific measures to improve Spain’s current legislative framework and the so-called innovation ecosystem.

The president of CEOE’s R&D Committee, Juan López-Belmonte, talked us through these measures proposed by entrepreneurs to improve Spain’s R&D status, kicking off with a great R&D State Pact. Entrepreneurs advocate that R&D should be backed by leadership from the government presidency and feature more generously in the General State Budget (Presupuestos Generales del Estado). 
Last week, during the presentation of the Presupuestos Generales del Estado 2018, the government stated that “among the quickest growing policies features R&D, with an increase of 8.3% on 2017; this spells 560 million euros more, adding up now to 7.04447 billion”.

"We now need to make up for lost ground because we are at the end of the road" argued Juan Rosell, who also stressed the need of increasing investment, both public and private, as well as simplifying and retrieving the legal certainty of R&D tax rebates, which, as things stand, “is unclear ". Rosell sees this Decalogue as the best way of catching up with the major European countries.