China’s STEM Flywheel and Europe’s TRL Trap: Why Innovation Pipelines Matter More Than Ideas

By early 2026, global innovation performance is increasingly determined by the structure and continuity of national innovation pipelines rather than by isolated scientific breakthroughs. This working paper analyzes the growing asymmetry between China and Europe in the production, translation, and deployment of engineering knowledge. China’s post-1999 expansion of higher education has matured into a large-scale STEM talent pipeline that is tightly coupled with manufacturing capacity and real-world deployment environments. Europe, while maintaining strong performance in early-stage research and regulatory frameworks, continues to experience structural bottlenecks in technology translation, particularly at intermediate and late Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs). The paper examines how these differences shape innovation outcomes in climate technologies, the built environment, and urban systems, where rapid experimentation, validation, and scaling are increasingly decisive. It argues that future competitiveness will depend less on idea generation and more on the ability of systems to learn quickly through dense feedback loops connecting education, experimentation, and deployment.