Working Paper: From the Universe to the Metaverse

This is the first milestone report of the 2023/24 Charlemagne Prize Academy Fellowship by Elena Bascone, in which she examines what the aerospace and aviation industry consortiums can teach to European XR businesses.

Abstract:

Francis Fukuyama famously called the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent end of the Cold War “the end of history”: 1990 marked an early end for what can be defined as the “short century”2 and an early beginning for a new era. The start of a new millennium brought new economic challenges, including the rise of new powers, the private sector, and the tech industry. During the Cold War, innovation was often a prerogative of the two superpowers that needed to foster innovation, especially in security or the aerospace sector, to compete with each other. After this historical caesura, innovation slowly became increasingly synonymous with private companies. As the perspectives involved in leading innovation increased, a new challenge arose: the need to find a positive and constructive point of contact between these different actors, the public and the private.

Indeed, when it comes to the private sector, it is impossible to think of a scenario where there is no point of contact with the public sector: collaboration between the two is critical for businesses for two reasons: 1. Quality 2. Funding. The result of this collaboration is also double: 1. Improved standards 2. Increase in the life of the products. Moreover, collaboration leads to greater economic prosperity in tangible and intangible forms. This is the reason why this policy report aims not only at highlighting the state of the art when it comes to the XR sector in Europe but also at showing businesses why it is economically efficient for them to collaborate with the public sector by bringing concrete examples from the aviation and aerospace industry.

The result of this analysis is an original model contained in this report, called the “Consortiums model”. As this first paper addresses businesses, this first part expands the model only on that side. Furthermore, this paper contains a “Collaboration function,” which indicates the variables needed to find and maximize collaboration, which businesses need if they want their innovations to be adopted. The model's second part will be explained in a later report called “A Digital Renaissance in Europe”, which will address policy-makers; a full version of this new model is also present in the appendix.