STEP, which stands for Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform, is the EU platform to strengthen the production of critical emerging technologies relevant to the green and digital transitions in the EU and to the strategic sovereignty of the Union. A tool, fed by different sources of funding from the EU budget, which aims to reach up to 160 billion euros of investment in the coming years, positioning itself as the precursor to a full-fledged European Sovereign Wealth Fund.
European industry is being challenged by a number of factors: high inflation, labour shortages, supply chain disruptions, rising interest rates, and spikes in energy costs and input prices.
Brussels has already unveiled several initiatives to support its industry, the most important and recent of which is the Green Deal Industrial Plan proposed in early February, the zero-emissions package for the competitiveness of European industry within which the idea of an embryonic form of a European sovereign wealth fund found a place.
The need for a more structural response to business investment made the Commission to launch STEP, in a sense the precursor to the European Sovereignty Fund. An instrument, the latter, hampered by politically divisive debates among
