Productivity in EU
Spent a long weekend in Sicily and had time to read some interesting stuff. Some quotes:

On European growth
" The pace of expansion is set to fall back this year and next to little over 2 percent - too modest to prevent a further widening of the gap in GDP per head between the EU and the United States."
Simon Tilford
Center of European Reform

My comment: too many doing low value (low pay) work

" Our growth rate is now mostly limited by our human resources capability"
Klaus Kleinfeld
CEO, Siemens

My comment: too many tied down with routine tasks

Kickstarting e-invoicing is of course only one step - but as we know not demanding large investments and possible to launch fast with the right will and skill. The target should be to get one common standard at least for the corporate mass market - the part of e-invoicing that can benefit from ready e-banking and payments infrastructure. This is well in keeping with global trends:

"We genuinly believe that radical sharing is a win-win for everyone. Expanding markets create new opportunities."
Tim Bray

"Standards is another area where openness is gaining momentum. In today´s complex and fast-moving economy the economic deficiences and liabilities caused by lack of standardization surface faster and they are more jarring and consequential than in the past."
Don Tapscott

Real time observations from EU-presidency conference i2010 in Espoo, Finland

Many speakers address the dilemma of finding the new GSM success story. Enough strong hand - but not too much. The known fact is that only standards will lead to competition which will lead to progress. But the jungle of vested interest seems to manage to hold back efforts to create this so very necessary base. What we need is statesmanship - signals from the EU commission has indicated that there the thinking is sound - minimize interference in nitty-gritty details and instead saving the gunpowder for bold moves. What now is needed is that the member states give their full support to these efforts.

EU-Commisar Vivian Reding made a very forceful speach - less talk and more action! Ms Susanna Huovinen - Finnish Minister for Communication hosting the event opened with a clear message - standardisation is needed - also in the logistics area - e-invoicing was mentioned as an important area.

And now we here from the CEO of France Telecom - that there are 8 million blogs in France. The chairman of Fujitsu will soon say that the rapid growth of user created content is forming a huge mass of collective intelligence. This taken together with ubiquitous mobile terminals for participating in the knowledge sharing and creation - and initiating transactions is paving way for a much faster development and realtime processes to improve productivity on a massive scale.

Should this not open the eyes of the last doubters? Clinging to the past has never been a good business model.