Business Forums and Industrial Policy: Toward a New High-Tech Economy in Late Twentieth-Century Europe

This article examines efforts to remake the European economy in the late twentieth century through innovations in organized business and industrial policy. By narrating the development of the “Big 12 Roundtable” and the European Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT) in the 1970s and 1980s, we show how the executive institution of the European Commission responded to global competitive pressures by creating “business forums”—groups of business elites organized by policymakers to serve as policy consultants—and by developing extensive technology and research programs to support the development of European technology firms. We then trace how the Big 12 Roundtable laid the foundation for other business forums, including the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), and how ESPRIT paved the way for the framework programs that have been hallmarks of European industrial policy and investment in research and development for half a century. Consequently, this article expands the business historical genealogy of organized business in Europe and contributes a new history of European industrial policy.