Europe Wrote Down Its Own Weakness. Korea Can Supply the Answer.
The Draghi report is a diagnosis of everything Europe cannot build fast enough. Read as a market map, it points to the capabilities Korean companies already sell.
Saint Clair Global · Market Intelligence | August 2026
Europe First — Part 1 of 4
Europe has published an unusually frank account of its own competitiveness problem, and to a company weighing entry, the Draghi report reads as a list of unmet demand. Between 2008 and 2021, 147 companies later worth more than a billion dollars were founded in Europe; 40 moved their headquarters abroad, most to the United States. More than 60 per cent of EU companies now name regulation as an obstacle to investment. The continent has the capital, the customers and the public purpose. What it lacks is the firms that turn research into products at scale — and that shortfall is the strongest reason for Korean companies to look to Europe, because it is a gap Korean industry is built to fill.
The Weakness Europe Wrote Down
The report commissioned from Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank president, set out to explain why the European economy has fallen behind the United States and China. Its findings are blunt. Only four of the world’s top fifty technology companies are European. In 2021, European firms spent €270 billion less on research and innovation than their United States counterparts. And for the past twenty years the largest corporate research investors in Europe have been dominated by automotive companies; in the United States, where autos and pharmaceuticals led in the early 2000s, the top three are now all in technology. Europe kept funding the industries of its past.
The talent record is the sharpest figure in the document. Of the 147 European unicorns founded between 2008 and 2021, 40 relocated their headquarters overseas, most of them to the United States, in search of the capital and scale their home market could not supply. Europe invents, then exports its winners. The report frames this as a scaling failure: the science is world-class, and the machinery that turns science into companies lags well behind it.
Regulation compounds the drag. The report records that more than 60 per cent of EU firms see regulation as a barrier to investment, and that 55 per cent of small and medium-sized enterprises rank regulatory and administrative burden as their single greatest challenge. Above that sits a fragmented rulebook: around 100 technology-focused laws and more than 270 regulators active in digital networks across the member states. Europe governs its digital economy thoroughly. It has made that economy hard to build in.
The clearest shortfall is in the digital and deep-technology sectors that now drive productivity growth. Where the United States has scaled cloud, chips and artificial intelligence, Europe has funded research programmes and watched the resulting companies leave.
The Response Is Already Funded
Implementation has been slow even where the diagnosis is accepted. The European Policy Innovation Council’s Draghi Observatory, which tracks the report’s 383 recommendations, put full implementation at 15.7 per cent in its July 2026 update, and 41.3 per cent counting partial progress. Energy and digitalisation are the least advanced.
Mario Draghi delivered the report in September 2024, at the European Commission’s own request, and few governments commission a review of their own weaknesses and then publish it in full. Since then, the Commission’s Competitiveness Compass has, by its own account, mobilised more than €1 trillion towards the problems Draghi identified. The largest lines include roughly €200 billion for artificial intelligence, of which €20 billion is set aside for a planned programme of AI gigafactories; €150 billion for defence through Security Action for Europe (SAFE); more than €100 billion for decarbonisation through the Clean Industrial Deal; and €70 billion for start-ups and scale-ups through TechEU.
The four figures are not of one kind. The artificial-intelligence and Clean Industrial Deal sums are mobilisation targets combining public and private money; SAFE is a lending ceiling for member states rather than a subsidy to industry; TechEU is the European Investment Bank’s financing envelope for 2025 to 2027. None of it is money already spent.
The money funds the effort to close the gap, on a timeline Europe controls. A continent committing more than €1 trillion to build capability it does not yet have will keep buying that capability from outside while it builds its own. For now, demand exceeds domestic supply.
Why This Is Korea’s Opportunity
Korea’s industrial character is the mirror image of Europe’s weakness. Where Europe struggles to scale research into products, Korea excels at exactly that conversion, moving from laboratory to manufactured output and then to global markets with unusual speed. Ugo Astuto, the European Union’s ambassador to Korea, put it plainly at the NextRise 2026 forum in Seoul in June: Europe is “at the cutting edge in several sectors of research”, while Korea is “particularly strong in transforming research into industrial output and scaling innovation”.
The proof already exists in the field. Since 2023, a Korean medical-AI company has worked as an independent reader inside a Swedish breast-screening centre, taking one of the two slots in a double-reading protocol that European systems could describe but not staff. The recall decision still rests with a radiologists’ consensus panel; what the system replaces is a read, not a judgement. The same logic extends across the sectors the Draghi report flags: applied artificial intelligence, semiconductors and advanced hardware, clean technology, and the industrial software European incumbents have been slow to build. In each, the European demand is documented and the domestic supply is thin. Korean firms sell into that space from a standing start.
Europe is a difficult market. The regulatory burden the report names falls on every entrant, and the fragmentation across member states defeats companies that treat the continent as a single customer. But compliance costs that slow the first entrant also slow the second. A Korean firm that clears the European standard holds that position longer than it would in a lighter-touch market.
For a founder choosing between regions, the United States offers scale and capital, and domestic competitors who already occupy every gap. Europe offers a market that has published, in detail, the places where it needs what it does not have. For the Korean companies able to fill the gap, Europe is the most open market they will find.
Sources:
The Draghi report on EU competitiveness — European Commission: https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-report_en
The Future of European Competitiveness, Part A — European Commission (PDF): https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/97e481fd-2dc3-412d-be4c-f152a8232961_en
The Future of European Competitiveness, Part B — European Commission (PDF): https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/ec1409c1-d4b4-4882-8bdd-3519f86bbb92_en
The Draghi report: one year on — European Commission: https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-report/one-year-after_en
Draghi Observatory & Implementation Index, July 2026 update — European Policy Innovation Council: https://draghiwatch.eu/
InvestAI (IP/25/467) — European Commission: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_467
SAFE (Security Action for Europe) — Council of the European Union: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/safe/
TechEU Platform — European Investment Bank: https://www.eib.org/en/press/all/2025-314-europe-s-innovative-companies-get-boost-as-eib-group-launches-techeu-platform-to-simplify-financing
Europe and Korea seek scale-up partnership at NextRise 2026 — Aju Press: https://www.ajupress.com/view/20260618171516456
Lunit and Capio S:t Göran Hospital collaborate to address radiologist shortage, June 2023: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lunit-and-capio-st-goran-hospital-collaborate-to-address-radiologist-shortage-with-ai-powered-mammography-analysis-301842062.html
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment or business advice. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.
About Saint Clair: Saint Clair is a cross-border investment firm between Europe and Asia: an institutional investor that also builds the infrastructure through which capital crosses borders. Saint Clair Global builds companies to international institutional standards: the company side of the practice, where a business is made to read as a successful, attractive investment opportunity to the capital it seeks. Since 2016.
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