Mission-driven innovation policy

The government focuses on strengthening innovation in the Netherlands to tackle societal challenges such as healthcare, agriculture, energy transition and defense. This is done by simplifying the mission-driven innovation policy, so that Dutch companies can better connect with these initiatives. Involvement of social organizations and the connection between social and technological knowledge are important in this. Action agendas are drawn up for the ten priority technologies from the National Technology Strategy and for five technology areas of the Dutch defense industry. Investments in peace and security are treated equally to other innovations. Together with companies and knowledge institutions, the government creates opportunities for new growth markets in the Netherlands, with a focus on SMEs, the region and young entrepreneurship.

Innovative earning capacity

The government is developing a market regulation framework to better manage good competition in digital markets. Work is being done to improve the Dutch AI ecosystem by facilitating access for companies, researchers and governments to supercomputers, high-quality knowledge and data.

Invest-NL will receive additional resources up to and including 2029. Part of this will be used to strengthen core capital, which will contribute to the growth of start-ups into scale-ups. In addition, Invest-NL will be given the opportunity to expand blended finance in order to address bottlenecks in corporate financing. This will provide additional support to innovative SMEs to grow and will further increase the social impact of Invest-NL. The government is also investigating how Invest International can be integrated with Invest-NL in the future.

The National Growth Fund programmes will deliver the first concrete results in the coming term of office and will thus strengthen Dutch earning capacity through investments in innovation, education and human capital. Together, the programmes account for €11.3 billion in public funds.

The government will focus on participation in European funds such as Digital Europe, Horizon Europe, InvestEU and Connecting Europe Facility and is working on increasing investments by the European Investment Bank in venture capital.

Deltaplan Valorisatie

The Ministries of Economic Affairs and Education, Culture and Science are working together in the new cabinet with knowledge institutions Techleap, the Regional Development Companies and other stakeholders to improve valorisation in the Netherlands.