Assessing Open Strategic Autonomy

The objective of this report is to help increase the EU’s open strategic autonomy (OSA) by providing data that help monitor and take steps to achieve OSA in the innovation and production domains. The report operationalises the concept and provides empirical insights into the current situation. It finds that the EU’s digital sector has obvious vulnerabilities that impair its OSA, most prominently in the areas of artificial intelligence and big data. Other areas of innovation also display some vulnerabilities, but which less obviously impair Europe's OSA, at least on the surface. In addition to pure economic dependencies, the changing geopolitical landscape has increased potential vulnerabilities stemming from international collaboration on innovation. Accordingly, increased attention should be paid to latent risks that might produce non-obvious or indirect innovation and production dependency relations in the future. In this respect, the role of the US is particularly critical, as US technologies and firms play a substantial role in innovation processes in Europe.