Mas-Colell’s participation in the Rhine Group aligns with BIST’s strategy to turn frontier research into disruptive innovation, new industrial capacity and greater European strategic autonomy.
Prof. Andreu Mas-Colell, renowned economist and Chairman of the BIST Board of Trustees, has joined the Rhine Group, a new European initiative co-chaired by former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi and biotechnology entrepreneur Patrick Collison that brings together leading figures from academia, business and public policy to contribute to Europe’s competitiveness agenda.
Prof. Andreu Mas-Colell, Chairman of the BIST Board of Trustees, is a renowned economist with a distinguished academic career and extensive experience in public policy, having held senior government responsibilities in research, universities, innovation and economic affairs.
Launched in August, the Rhine Group aims to help translate the diagnosis and recommendations of the Draghi Report into actionable proposals to strengthen Europe’s competitiveness, technological capacity and strategic autonomy. The group argues that Europe needs to urgently recover its ability to “compete, build, and grow again”, at a time when the continent is losing ground in key emerging technologies and becoming increasingly exposed to external economic and geopolitical dependencies.
With London School of Economics Professor Luis Garicano as Executive Director, other prominent members of the Group alongside Mas-Colell include Prof. Katalin Karikó, Nobel laureate in Medicine and founder of biotech company Repeat Therapeutics; Profs. Bengt Holmström and Philippe Aghion, Nobel laureates in Economics; Matt Clifford, Chair of the UK Advanced Research and Invention Agency; Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist; and Cristina Garmendia, former Spanish Minister and President of the Cotec Foundation for Innovation, one of the organisations with which BIST has been working to advance a more ambitious disruptive innovation agenda in Spain.
Closely aligned with BIST’s disruptive innovation strategy
The Rhine Group seeks to narrow the gap between the analysis set out in the Draghi Report and its practical implementation, prioritising reforms capable of reversing Europe’s relative decline in technology, productivity and innovation. This diagnosis is closely aligned with the strategy BIST has been developing to strengthen the connection between frontier research, disruptive innovation and new industrial development.
In May, BIST joined forces with Cotec, AseBio, AESEMI and Farmaindustria in an unprecedented joint appearance before the Spanish Congress. Their central message was the need for an end-to-end disruptive innovation policy spanning the entire value chain —from frontier knowledge creation, valorisation and financing to the development and scaling of new industries and the transformation of existing ones. Such innovation falls between traditional science and industrial policies and therefore requires dedicated instruments and frameworks, in line with the recommendations of the Draghi Report.
The leaders of the five organisations that jointly appeared in the Spanish Congress in May.
This end-to-end approach responds to a fundamental challenge for Spain and Europe: we already possess outstanding scientific capabilities, but still struggle to turn enough frontier knowledge into strategic technologies, intellectual property, companies and industrial capacity. BIST’s disruptive innovation strategy addresses this gap through two complementary pillars: a dedicated technology transfer arm operating within a new regulatory framework, and a dedicated frontier-innovation valorisation and investment vehicle. Through them, BIST aims to maximise the potential of the frontier research generated across its centres to deliver new technologies, companies and industrial capabilities.
For BIST, this is also a question of European technological sovereignty. Strategic autonomy cannot be achieved solely by securing supply chains or protecting established industries: Europe also needs to generate its own frontier technologies and retain the intellectual property, talent and know-how associated with them.
Building on the Draghi agenda
Mas-Colell’s engagement with the debate on European competitiveness long predates the creation of the Rhine Group. Indeed, the BIST Chairman was among the experts and organisations that contributed to the preparation of the Draghi Report.
Mas-Colell has also highlighted the urgency of its diagnosis in several opinion pieces. More broadly, the questions raised by the Draghi Report have become increasingly central to BIST’s own strategic reflection on the role of frontier research in Europe’s competitiveness and strategic autonomy.
At the BIST Forum 2025, which brought together representatives from the scientific, political and economic spheres —including the Presidents of the European Research Council (ERC) and the European Innovation Council (EIC), Maria Leptin and Michiel Scheffer— BIST placed the role of frontier research in strengthening European competitiveness and shaping the industries of the future at the centre of the debate.
This debate was taken a step further at the BIST Forum 2026, Frontier Research: The Foundation for a New Industry, which explored the changes needed to turn scientific discoveries into new industrial capabilities. Nadia Calviño, President of the European Investment Bank, contributed to the debate through a keynote address and the subsequent roundtable. Discussions stressed the need for more agile knowledge transfer, adequate funding, and stronger public-private collaboration to bridge the gap between scientific discovery and industrial development.
These discussions underpin the same conviction that is now driving BIST’s disruptive innovation strategy: with the right policies and instruments to unlock its potential, Europe’s world-class frontier research can be a key asset for strengthening competitiveness, strategic autonomy and technological sovereignty.
