Airbus of… ​Lessons for European Industrial Collaboration

Can Europe Create Another Airbus? Calls for an “Airbus of…” have become a recurring feature of European industrial policy debates. From chips and cloud to artificial intelligence, batteries and satellites, the underlying concern is the same: can Europe... More

Can Europe Create Another Airbus? Calls for an “Airbus of…” have become a recurring feature of European industrial policy debates. From chips and cloud to artificial intelligence, batteries and satellites, the underlying concern is the same: can Europe pool its fragmented industrial and financial capacities to compete with dominant US and Asian firms? A new CERRE paper by Patricia Nouveau argues that Airbus offers important lessons - but not a blueprint that Europe can simply replicate. To test how far the Airbus model can travel, the paper compares it with other major European industrial projects, including Unidata in computing, Gaia-X in cloud and data infrastructure, and Galileo in satellite navigation, with IRIS² considered as a more recent extension of the European space case. What makes European industrial collaboration work? The comparison identifies four factors that strongly influence whether cross-border industrial cooperation succeeds: - The attractiveness of al Less