How is the geography of science changing? The Demos thinktank spent 18 months interviewing more than 400 industrialists, academics and policy makers in China, India and South Korea, to understand how R&D will evolve.

It's getting much easier to start research and development (R&D) organisations almost anywhere on the planet, and that is changing how science and innovation are done.

"We used to know where ideas came from - the US, Europe and Japan - and that they would flow from the core to the periphery," said Charles Leadbetter, a leading member of the Demos Atlas of Ideas project team. "Now places that were peripheral 10 years ago are more central."

The change is happening quickly. According to Leadbetter, "Intel took five months to create a lab in Shanghai with between 1000 and 2000 employees. By 2012 it wants to have 10,000 employees there. South Korea has come from nowhere in genetics to doing world-class science - in six years."

The rise of China, India and Korea as powers in the knowledge economy could be a double-edged sword, he believes.

"It could feed increasing anxiety in the US and Europe. There's no doubt there is a converging challenge to US and European predominance in knowledge-based industries," he said. "But there are also opportunities in new markets such as power, health and environment. And on a global scale it is important we have more brains working in more places on more problems, especially because science is increasingly happening across disciplines.

"We need to have a longer-term outlook," Leadbetter argued. "The worst case is a retreat to techno-nationalism," in which countries hoard their technologies and protect their markets to stave off competition. He said many perceptions about China, India and South Korea are wrong. India and South Korea, for example, both believe that they, too, face a skills shortage, rather than being an abundant source of cheap labour for the developed world. Nor are the three countries a homogenous bloc.

"There is no Asian innovation model," said Leadbetter. "Chinese innovation is driven by the state, while Indian innovation is driven by networks of expatriates. China is demonstrating strong echoes of techno-nationalism, while India is demonstrating interdependent innovation.

"And it is a hall of mirrors - quantity does not equal quality," he added. "Probably only 10% of Indian graduates are to international standards. Korea produces many scientific papers, but they aren't widely cited. It's a case of choosing your yardstick and measuring the outputs, not the inputs."

Why collaborate?

Although the open innovation model is spreading through the Western R&D community, 'techno-nationalists' still question the value of collaboration, especially with emerging economies whose development could threaten their technical or market supremacy. So why is collaboration the better option?

"Scientists have always travelled more widely than other thinkers and producers," said Professor Colin Blakemore, chief executive of the UK's Medical Research Council. "Science is without national economic boundaries and is, in essence, universal."

Blakemore argues that European scientists collaborate with developed countries such as the US because of the shared scientific culture and the desire to access its intellectual resources, research network and support services.

"So why collaborate with new economies?" he said. "It isn't altruism, but an interest in country-specific problems such as malaria, as well as self-interest in problems that could impact the UK, such as the SARS virus."

Blakemore sees collaboration as a way to access the large investments in R&D being made in places such as Singapore, and tap an increasingly mobile and diverse global workforce. He believes collaboration is not a one-way traffic either - it helps developing countries strengthen their research capabilities, as well as driving improvements in infrastructure, health, education, agriculture and other socio-economic advances.

Esko Aho, president of Finnish research organisation SITRA, and author of the Aho Report on creating an innovative Europe, says Europe has an R&D investment deficit, is poor at commercialising its basic science, and faces an ageing workforce.

"The goals of Europe and Asia are complementary," Aho said. "We have to be co-operative and create tools and methods to collaborate with Asia."

The future innovation landscape will be faster moving, more fluid and turbulent than that of today, according to Professor Denis Simon, of the Levin Institute at the State University of New York: "We have to innovate very quickly and on a continuous basis. It's about survival, so we will see more complex collaborations and wars over talent, standards, patents and intellectual property rights."

Simon believes there are several major drivers for the globalisation of R&D. The first is the reshaping of the global order by the emergence of five new economies, as well as new technological capabilities emerging from the Asian Dragon countries and small states such as Ireland and Scotland.

Other factors include the impact of software, intensifying competition that will drive the search for profit margins through differentiation enabled by innovation, and simultaneity - the requirement to adapt and improve all aspects of a business at once, and everywhere it operates.

Jonathan Adams, chief executive of Evidence, a company that analyses corporate research performance, sums up the advantages of collaboration as offering access to intellectual and physical resources, multiple viewpoints, parallel research lines and distributed innovation. Collaboration also enables the pooling of resources on large projects, such as the ITER fusion research facility, which reduces wasteful duplication.

A starker view of the advantages of R&D collaboration with emerging economies was presented by Dr David Concar, director of science and innovation, China, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, British Embassy Beijing.

"China's current development path is energy and resource hungry and therefore unsustainable, plus it's a big carbon-dioxide contributor," he said. "What's worse - a competitive, innovative China, or a China that is not on a path that will reduce the impact of its growth? The global context has changed - it's now about water, oil, resources and the climate."

Eight drivers

Leadbetter outlines eight factors driving the rise of innovation in China, India and Korea. The first is sheer market momentum in these new economies.

"China is building a new coal-fired power station every four or five days," he said. "It is adding 60 million mobile subscribers each year, which means having to try to create routers for mobile phones at one third of their costs in Europe."

South Korea, meanwhile, could develop a new model of ubiquitous innovation, built on its strong uptake of broadband connections and collaboration tools such as the mini homepage, a quickly updated personal website. This kind of ubiquitous innovation can also provide political power through standards setting.

The second major factor is state support for innovation, with China, India and South Korea all mandating increased research intensity - China towards spending 2.5% of GDP on R&D by 2010, South Korea moving towards spending 3%, and India planning to reach 2% by 2012.

The presence of multinationals is also driving innovation. China had 20 multinational R&D centres in 1997, and now has 750, although some analysts set the figure at 980. India has 120, 100 of which have opened since the year 2000.

"The combination of a huge collective work ethic and Western management could create enormous innovation," said Leadbetter.

The fourth major factor is access people and skills. India has 14.5 million graduates, and adds 2.5 million more each year. China had 4.7 million graduates enrolled in 2004. Both countries also benefit from a tide of returning graduates who are bringing back skills they learned overseas and applying them in their home countries.

"Airports are thronging with returnees," said Leadbetter. "The brain drain has become a brain gain. There are also people who are not returnees but are more like two-country commuters, who contribute to a 'talent Gulf Stream'," circulating through the world's technology hotspots. Like the returners, 'home-grown heroes' such as Infosys in India are showing developing countries what they can do for themselves.

Further innovation drivers in developing countries include their non-Western cultural and ethical outlooks, which could, on the positive side, lead to the emergence of new science or, on the negative, undermine development through factors such as excessive control, or lack of respect for intellectual property.

Leadbetter also believes that developing countries could become hotbeds of 'new science in new ways', global centres of excellence in new disciplines such as the fusion of bio-, info- and nano-technologies. In the brightest of possible futures, the developing economies could provide the 'next people and next places' to lead science.

Key restraints

Of course, it isn't all plain sailing. There are a host of issues that could get in the way of this bright new future.

Leadbetter suggests the tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism is a factor: "Korea wants to be cosmopolitan but sounds nationalistic. China sounds nationalistic but is dependent on foreign inward investment. India is over-concerned with foreign inward investment."

There may also be competition between incumbents and new entrants - will political reformers be able to make room for new entrants to challenge incumbents? And how will the disparity between scientific elites and the wider masses play out?

"Korea feels like it's about innovation," said Leadbetter. "In China and India innovation feels like an elite activity, while the masses worry about water, health and food."

Blakemore sees other challenges, including the need to dismantle over-controlling hierarchies, encourage free thinking and individual responsibility. Developing countries will also need to create frameworks that support research ethics and integrity, align local and global regulatory environments, and make decisions about whether to work on big ideas or local concerns.

What's available?

Despite these issues, each of the key developing-world nations has treasures to offer potential collaborators, according to Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature. He says South Korea hosts key research centres at SNU, KAIST, and Pohang University, and is making inroads in materials chemistry, nanomaterials, spintronics, information storage materials and stem cell research.

Campbell says India is making a mark in biotech and pharmaceuticals at various centres, and already boasts 22 Fellows of the Wellcome Trust, a philanthropic organisation that funds research. China's innovation is being driven by returnees from the US, better peer review in its funding agencies, and greater control of misconduct. The devil, however, is in the detail. Campbell says China's annual submissions to Nature rose by 48% from 2003 to 2006, and to its biology journals by 91%. India's annual submissions to Nature rose 22% in the same period, while South Korea's submissions rose 12%. But there's been no increase in acceptance rates.

The other key country that Campbell highlights is Singapore, for its long-term commitment to funding, low bureaucratic burden, high and enforced ethical standards and strong intellectual property framework. Companies such as Novartis are already taking advantage of Singapore's strengths.

The fundamentals

The question is, are these developing nations ready to host fundamental science? Lord Bhikhu Parekh, emeritus professor of political theory at the University of Hull, said: "We should be approaching collaboration in the spirit of generosity and openness. But there is no threat as far as China and India is concerned. I can't remember any major science coming out of China in the past 20 to 30 years. And India is the same.

"We should consider whether there are institutions [in these countries] that can sustain long-term scientific creativity, institutions that have gained momentum and will continue for years to come," he added.

Of course, those intimately involved with science in each country beg to differ.

China

Dr Wang Baoqing, minister counsellor for science and technology at the Chinese Embassy in London, says that China spent 1.34% of its GDP on research and development in 2004, and filed 130,000 patents.

"By 2020 our R&D spend should be 2.5% of GDP, in key areas including mineral resources, the environment, agriculture, manufacturing, communications and transport," he said. But he admits China's aggregate economic volume is just 16.6% of the US, and its per capita gross domestic product is 3.6% of the US, "making us 129th in the world".

Prof Chunli Bai, executive vice president of Chinese Academy of Sciences and director, China National Centre for Nanoscience and Technology, points out China is having success in some areas. The country developed a scanning probe microscope in the 1980s and ultra-fine particles and fine ceramics in 1987. Now nanoscience and technology has become one of China's 40 basic research areas, to go with protein research, quantum physics and reproductive medicine, among others.

"Funding [for nanoscience] in China is $130m. In the UK it is $162m and in the US $1593m," he said, claiming China was second in the world in publication of nanotechnology papers, and fourth citations in nanotechnology between 1992 and 2002.

"We are now building our major research infrastructure, such as the Shanghai synchrotron radiation facility, and spallation neutron sources.

"Our long-term vision is a dedicated effort to explore new principles, technologies and methods in nanomaterials, nanodevices, nanobiology and and nanomedicine," he said. "Our challenges include making nanotubes, supramolecular chemistry, CMOS, biology and diagnosis, and standards and assessment.

"So the nanoscience community in China spans from the fundamental science to studying the potential societal impacts and concerns."

India

India is also making progress in fundamental science. Dr RA Mashelkar, former director-general, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, India said: "Asia Pacific has taken over from the European Union and the US in disciplines such as materials science."

It is also beginning to be more than a low-cost manufacturing site for pharmaceuticals. Dr Swati Piramal, director of Nicholas Piramal India Ltd, a pharma company, says India now has intellectual property, technology, low costs, high quality and speed.

"My company has grown its sales 28% a year over the past 15 years. Between 2003 and 2006 we became a top-10 contract manufacturer," she said. "We have now taken Western catalyst technology back to India to improve manufacturing processes. The Standard and Poor rating agency has said my company was one of seven Indian companies to challenge global leaders."

Nicholas Piramal India Ltd is working on a cancer drug for Gleevec-resistant cancers and has a drug for rheumatoid arthritis in clinical trials.

"One year ago we had one drug in clinical trials," Piramal added. "Now we have seven or eight drugs going into trials.

"We just made an agreement with Eli Lilly, where we've licensed a molecule they have discovered in its pre-clinical stage and will take it from the pre-clinical stage into phase two trials. If it works both companies have an option to continue the development.

"We're good at manufacturing and we can we have access to many 'treatment-light' patients [who aren't using many other medicines that could confuse trial results] so we can do quicker trials.

"It's a relay race," she added. "People will do the best parts of research where it is best done, then pass it on. It's that multiplied by the power of numbers. In the next three years we will see fundamental technology come from India."

Korea

Korea's position in fundamental science is an enigma, according to Dr Jong Bhak, director of the Korean Bioinformation Centre.

"Korean gross domestic product per head is 36th in the world," he said. "Why isn't Korea more successful? We lack a central basic science engine and we don't have an influx of innovators. Education is good, with 82% of high school graduates going to college. But Koreans have become too smart to go to Korean universities."

Bhak claims some successes though. "Korea is 10th in the world in pharmaceuticals and number one in memory chips. We are also looking at BINT, the combination of biotechnology and information technology and nanotechnology, a fusion technology where engineering drives innovation."

And he points to a cultural issue that could fuel long-term research: "Koreans are crazy about health and well-being."

It's also a country in a hurry, having developed from a largely agrarian economy to an industrialised one in little over forty years. Bhak, who has already had great success in Western scientific research terms, gave up his position in the West because he felt progress was too slow.

"One of the reasons I left a tenured position at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge was that it was too small and I could see its limits," he said. Bhak wants to use technological developments to create bioinformatics systems that can do large-scale automatic processing of '-omics' data, such as that developed in genomics and proteomics studies.

"Korea is particularly interested in this kind of large-scale automatic processing because we are a small country," he said. He predicts such focus will have a radical effect on where various forms of science are done in future.

"China will dominate the -omics disciplines by overtaking the UK and US," Bhak said. "Big pharma should prepare for fast clinical tests in Asia, fast drug discovery and a different culture about health. I predict a Chinese toy company will overtake Microsoft as a software giant and an Asian health drink company will overtake GlaxoSmithKline as a heathcare giant."

Leadbetter used 'next people and next places' as shorthand to describe the emergence of future science and innovation hotspots. Bhak is sure he knows where they will be.

"The next people are Asian," Bhak said. "We have experienced 200 years of Western industrialisation in 30 years, what I call 'generation 386' after the microprocessor, so we have very high expectations."

Cultural issues

So what will it take to work with such driven partners? National cultures and personal outlook may be one key component in successful global collaborations, according to Jonathan Kestenbaum, chief executive officer of the UK's National Endowment of Science, Technology and the Arts.

"There are four cultural influences that lend themselves to collaboration," he said. "The first is ambition, which is to do with validating risk, curiosity, imagination and inquiry. The second is a certain type of self-confidence that, with self-criticism, creates the ability to collaborate. The third is that innovation should be widely distributed, because this creates a culture of dissent. The fourth is an ability to hold many identities, for example commitments to a national identity as well as professional identity."

Qiu Renzong, professor of bioethics in the Institute of Philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, says that the political context can affect a nation's ability to collaborate and innovate: "Chinese nationalism is a reaction to a national crisis. China has to invite science and democracy in, and it is less than halfway there."

He says making that change will mean accepting new concepts, such as putting people first, accepting international standards and looking for peaceful development and a harmonious world. He also suggests that Western ideas may not have primacy in a more globalised world.

"Is international always Western?" he asked. "Some Chinese bio-ethicists see basic ethical principles as Western and want to reject them in favour of Confucianism. But Confucianism says 'do no harm'. China needs proper regulation of animal research to ensure that it does not become a hub for unethical research."

Campbell of Nature identifies several national research cultures, and says China's scientists are well aware of the ethical issues.

"In all our contacts and articles from Chinese researchers, they're really worried about issues of ethics and evaluation," he said. "Meanwhile Indian researchers have highlighted the need for a more irreverent culture in the lab."

Campbell says institutions in China and South Korea now pay bonuses for getting published in top journals, which accelerates individual effort but makes collaboration more problematic, with a knock-on effect on the overall science culture: "Will this can-do culture allow real long-term science to get embedded in China?"

It's all about people

One of the compelling reasons for seeking global collaboration is simply to be able to employ enough people.

Simon from State University of New York said: "There's a flat or declining growth in the number of knowledge workers. By 2009 one quarter of the world's workforce will use technology to work at home or on the go. Everyone is looking to talent, which is getting harder to find, so companies must master the management of global groups of workers."

Professor AnnaLee Saxenian of the School of Information at UC Berkeley, said: "There's a war for talent. But why now? The liberalisation of markets, people's ability to live in two places at once, the decentralisation of corporate hierarchies and the vertical specialisation of production, open supplier networks and advanced software platforms, all enable long-distance collaboration. So we have to deal with not just corporations but also cross-regional entrepreneurial networks, not just the nation state but aggressive regional governments, and not just low-cost labour but enabling the upgrading of local skills."

Saxenian says that Silicon Valley has become the model for what can happen when the best minds can travel to a technology hotspot. She says the Silicon Valley phenomenon emerged due to the post-Second War 'brain drain' of leading scientists from developing countries into the US, as well as internal migration. This may have drained those developing countries of their talent, but over the long term it has created some surprising benefits for them as well.

"By 2000, 52% of Silicon Valley engineers and scientists were foreign-born, usually with a Masters or PhD degree," she said. "People say Silicon Valley is built on ICs, but they mean Indians and Chinese, not integrated circuits."

Saxenian says immigrants have used the Internet to create ethnic networks in Silicon Valley, networks that prove important in an environment where people change jobs and start companies very quickly. She argues that the success of individual immigrants has created role models in their home countries, which have helped those cultures to change their self-image, and develop wider, cross-cutting networks.

Saxenian has dubbed these global wanderers 'new Argonauts', prepared to suffer great hardship to achieve great success. They've used their cultural, linguistic and organisational knowledge to find and tap unused resources back home that can be brought to bear on Silicon Valley problems. The classic examples include the way Israelis reused military knowledge in commercial applications, the Taiwanese tapped into low-cost manufacturing back home, and Indians called on their home country's underemployed programmers.

Once the new Argonauts have had their Silicon Valley success, many of them go home to do the same thing closer to their roots. There, they have set up development centres or launched companies, lobbying policymakers for the kind of infrastructure and regulatory regime that enabled Silicon Valley's success.

"Their experience is to succeed, become role models and then advise the next generation," said Saxenian. "Some fail but keep experimenting while others just play a bridging role or simply become researchers or service providers.

"In the long-term, brain circulation replaces the brain drain in the global economy"

Mashelkar of the Indian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research says that a recent study by NASSCOM, India's leading high-technology business association, shows that India has gained 30,000 returnees in the past three years. "It's a third wave into India: first of money, then of technology, now of people."

Shantanu Bhagwat, a partner at venture capital company Amadeus Capital Partners, points out that India faces a demographic trend entirely counter to that of Europe: "Over the next 10 years we will have millions more skilled Indians, with the population predicted to grow from 1027 million to 1268 million, or 200 million more people.

"And they're going to be young, smart and footloose. Migrants are more risk taking."

Of course, it is not all good news. Cong Cao, a research fellow at the Levin Institute, has studied the brain drain of Chinese academics. His conclusions don't make for happy reading for China.

Cong says that between 1978 and the end of 2005, 933,400 Chinese graduates studied abroad, of whom just 232,900 returned. Between 1985 and 2004 China awarded 100,000 science and technology PhDs. There are now 62,500 Chinese science and technology PhDs in the US workforce.

Why don't these people return? Cong says the opportunity costs are too high. Chinese salaries are lower than in the US. Researchers may have established families in the US for whom China would be a foreign country, and are worried about career development. They can't face China's continuing political ritual, and its impact on the practice of research. And they may be rejected by stay-at-home academics who don't want competition. He concludes that China's best and brightest go abroad and stay there.

Li Gong, managing director of the Windows Live China operation for Microsoft in Beijing, is a classic 'new Argonaut'. He left China in 1987 and went to study at Cambridge University, UK.  Later he moved to the East Coast of the US, followed by the West Coast of the US and finally back to China in 2001.

He finds that China's returnees are now in a difficult situation. Many want to stay in the US, but the dot-com bubble created job insecurity for those over 40, which drove them home to China. Now it's increasingly difficult for returnees to find a place to highlight their potential.

"China is now confident enough not to want to import Western standards," said Li. "They want to do a hybrid. There is also increasing resistance to the importation of people and ideas to China.

"If you work in a multinational in China you can end up a foreigner to both the multinational and to China."

Blakemore of the Medical Research Council points out that some Chinese researchers are bridging the gap by splitting their research across US and Chinese labs, using the US labs to do discovery and the Chinese labs to do the more mechanistic work.

The key question that emerges from all this fluidity is: where will people's allegiance lie, if they live in one country, work in another and were born in a third?

"Where does our allegiance lie?" asked Li Gong. "We're like athletes who want to be on the team that can win. There are a few places where we can use our talent and get paid, so our allegiance is not to a country or a company or even an expertise."

Saxenian says that people's allegiance in Silicon Valley was to the challenge of advancing technology. "Now that is becoming global."

The counter view

Not everyone believes that India, South Korea and particularly China can build the sort of innovation economies that have evolved in the West over the past 200 years.

Will Hutton, former editor of The Observer newspaper, chief executive of the Work Foundation and author of a book entitled The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21^st Century, says the idea has been oversold.

"The exaggeration of the prospects of Brazil, Russia, India, and China is unhelpful since it scares the West into protectionism," he said. "It's why the Doha trade talks got into trouble and why the Democrats have become strong in the US. Globalisation is tilted very strongly to the West. India's exports are approximately equivalent to those of Spain and we don't talk about Spain dominating the globe in 2050."

Hutton says capitalism is more subtle than just its hard processes, and is a complex interaction between the hard processes and soft.

"Successful capitalist societies are as much about profit-seeking in the capital market as about the plurality of decision-making," he said.

He argues that one of the most important pillars of an innovation economy is having the right institutions, underpinned by education, property rights, civil rights and rights to participate. Innovation economies also need solid processes of justification and accountability, which all exist in the public realm.

"It's bloody difficult to get these kinds of institutions just by plucking them off the shelf. They are hard fought and not easy to do," he said.

Hutton argues both Israel and Taiwan have managed to create the right conditions over the past 30 years, which is why they are interesting.

"China has invested in capabilities, but doesn't have the pluralism and justification," he said. "The Chinese market is going backwards not forwards. In India the UK link legacy has given the justification processes, but not the same capability. The caste system means there are 115m Untouchables among 1.1bn people. Functional literacy is poor. You don't construct good innovation systems in such circumstances."

Hutton says that the whole concept of a company, with its legal existence, autonomy, rights and responsibilities, is difficult to embed in a culture. He points out that Chinese companies can have a Communist Party committee second-guessing board decisions.

"Eight percent of China's GDP is counterfeits. Two thirds of the goods that the US confiscates are from China. One fifth of Chinese brands are counterfeit," he added. "China is a low-technology economy where firms are transient and small.

"Constructing a genuinely innovative economy is bloody hard. It's extraordinarily difficult to create the institutions to underpin it," he said. "We should be open, and understand the great mountain they have to climb rather than terrorising ourselves. The real story is that the rules of globalisation are tilted in our favour, and unfairly. Globalisation is not a zero sum game."

Adam Segal of the US Council on Foreign Relations is also sceptical about the prospects for innovation and collaboration with developing nations, but for different reasons.

"Competition is as likely as collaboration," he said. "In both the US and China there are very mixed views about openness. China sees openness as driving its long-term goal to increase its technological power.

"The US has a very schizophrenic relationship with China. This affects relationships in the context of collaboration, which is ironic because both China and the US benefit so much from openness."

Segal points to the way that China is now trying to develop its own technical standards, in everything from DVD players and mobile phones to wi-fi networking, which run counter to its responsibilities as a member of the World Trade Organisation.

"There's a populist backlash against globalisation, he added. "Technology companies have run ahead of the nation state."

Segal says the security community sees global collaboration on innovation as a zero-sum game, and points out that the founder of Huawei, the networking equipment company, came from the laboratories of the People's Liberation Army.

"US policy is all over the place," he said. The strategy is first, to co-operate, second, to out-compete China by addressing weaknesses in the US system and third, to prevent technology flow to China.

"While collaboration is pushing forwards, at least in the US there is a great deal of suspicion about where that is taking it," he concluded.

Saxenian at UC Berkeley rejects Hutton's view that there's something about Western institutions that make them uniquely suitable to foster innovation.

"I'm not sure enlightenment values are the key to capitalism," she said. "Capitalism continues to evolve. One possibility is that China could develop its own statist capitalist model. With 8% economic growth a year, it works."

Conclusions

At the end of the conference that presented the findings of the Demos research, Leadbetter tried to sum up what the project had learnt.

His first thought was that many of the most interesting changes that had been discussed were hybrids - of cultures, organisational approaches, or disciplines.

"The key skill here will be of managing, negotiating and designing the interdependencies," he said.

His second conclusion was that the issue of global innovation is alarmingly complex: "The types of knowledge you need to understand all this change include contextual knowledge, continual knowledge, cross-disciplinary knowledge and highly distributed knowledge."

His final thought struck closest to home, prompted by his feelings on return to Europe after field trips to Asia: "It was relief and exasperation: relief that Europe is so rich; yet exasperation that it is so stagnant, slow and alarmingly unambitious."

Leadbetter says that to change this, Europe needs to be able to its combine people and ideas, to have challenging conversations about where we are going, and to be prepared to commit its resources.

"Europe could be a beacon for innovation around quality of life, yet we don't seem to have the ambition to do it," he added, ending his remarks by quoting the mayor of Shanghai, who had told him: "There's no progress without reform, and no reform without debate and experimentation."