Order of European Inventors and Innovators
I have written here about what an order of merit cannot do and about the link that breaks between laboratory and market. Among Romanian inventors there is an old proposal that tries to cover exactly that gap: a national structure dedicated to creativity and technology transfer.
It is not this Order’s proposal and it is nobody’s decision. It is an idea that has circulated for over a decade, in different forms, and it deserves to be taken seriously — including in the matter of why such structures fail.
What such an agency would do
The idea, in its recurring form, gathers several functions that currently have no holder:
The inventory. Nobody knows, at national level, how many valid Romanian patents have a working prototype and how many have an interested manufacturer. Without that inventory, any public policy in the field is guesswork.
The crossing stage. Small, fast funding for proof of concept — the sums and timescales I wrote about separately.
Matchmaking. An inventor with a solution and a firm with the problem that solution solves currently find each other by accident, at fairs or through acquaintances. The intermediary function exists in other countries and has a name: technology transfer.
The educational part. Training the teachers who would teach technical creation, the materials, the programmes.
Why an agency and not something else
For the reason I set out in the article on obstacles: a project whose support is a person has the lifespan of that person’s tenure. An institution is the mechanism by which an idea outlives the people who had it.
The argument holds. But it is not sufficient, and it is only honest to say why.
Why such structures usually fail
European administrative history is full of technology transfer agencies that transferred nothing. The causes repeat:
They are judged on activity, not on result. An agency that reports the number of events organised and partnerships signed can operate for ten years without a single invention reaching production. If the indicator is not “solutions that reached use”, the institution will optimise something else.
They end up distributing funds instead of solving problems. Once a structure has a budget, the budget becomes its centre of gravity, and the allocation procedure swallows the mission.
They lack people who have made the journey. Technology transfer is a practical trade. An agency run entirely by administrators will write excellent procedures for a process it does not understand.
They overlap what already exists. Romania already has technology transfer offices in universities, innovation centres, regional structures. Some work. A new agency that ignores them adds a layer, not a solution.
What the proposal would need in order to deserve support
A single, verifiable indicator, fixed in advance: the number of solutions that reached a real user, year by year. The rest is detail.
A sunset clause: if the indicator is not met within five years, the structure closes. Few institutional proposals contain such a thing, and that is precisely why few are credible.
Staff with practical experience of taking a product from drawing to shelf, not only of administering programmes.
And an honest map of what already exists, with an explanation of what current structures cannot do.
Our position
The Order does not propose founding an agency and has no standing to do so. What we can do is what we do: say plainly where the chain breaks, publicly recognise the merit of those who create, and keep the discussion about the missing institutions open — including about their risks.
An institutional idea supported uncritically is not supported; it is weakened. The most useful contribution a community of specialists can bring to a public policy proposal is an honest list of the ways it might fail.