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Romania’s young people want. They want more than the usual figures about them suggest. Romania has one of the highest shares of students enrolled in STEM programmes in the European Union, 30.9% against an average of 26.9%, according to the Education and Training Monitor 2025. And among girls, too, the share rises above the European average. The appetite for science, engineering and technology is real, contradicting the image of a passive generation.
And yet, between desire and conditions lies a distance that is hard to cross. These same young people use generative AI the least of any in the EU, 44.1% in 2025 against an average of 63.8%, according to data from Eurostat. Romania has the highest share of young people aged 15-29 who are neither in education, nor in work, nor in any form of training, 19.2% in 2025, the highest rate in the Union. On the 2022 PISA tests, almost half of 15-year-olds were below the baseline level in mathematics. Only 27.7% of Romanians, across the population as a whole, have basic digital skills, compared with the European average of 55.6%, and the gap does not disappear in the younger generation either, since among those aged 16-24 barely 47% reach the minimum threshold, against around 70% in the Union, according to the Digital Decade reports. And more than half of young people say, in the Friedrich Ebert Foundation – Romania’s 2024 study, that they want to leave the country.
This is the paradox we begin from. There is will, there is talent, but the ground on which they can bear fruit is still uncertain. This article is about how we firm up that ground, starting from a premise worth clarifying. Innovation is neither a destiny nor a commodity that the state buys ready-made. It is something we either do together or do not do at all.
Two narratives that disarm young people
When it comes to technology, young people usually hear two stories. They sound very different, yet they have the same effect: they take young people out of the equation.
The first story is technofatalism. The future of work is supposedly already written; jobs disappear, and artificial intelligence decides in our place. This anxiety is useful for clicks, but discouraging for anyone who wants to act. If everything is decided in advance, the only reasonable reaction seems to be resignation or departure.
The second story is technosolutionism, and its tone is cheerful. Learn to give commands to a chatbot, take a short course, download the right app, and your future is prosperous. At the national level, it sounds different but follows the same logic: we write one more strategy, we buy a few more licences, and innovation will happen on its own. Evgeny Morozov popularised this attitude, technosolutionism, back in 2013. It is the habit of recognising a problem only if it appears solvable with a tool, forgetting that many problems are social and political, not bugs to be optimised through code.
Innovation is a network, not an inventory
The distinction between destiny, commodity and joint action changes the diagnosis, and the diagnosis changes the solutions.
Seen as an inventory, Romania’s problem looks like one of equipment. We lack research money, we lack laboratories, we lack programmes. This is largely true. We spend roughly 0.5% of GDP on research and development, the least in the Union, where the average is around 2.2%, according to Eurostat. On innovation we are rated at just 37.7% of the European average, according to the European Innovation Scoreboard 2025.
But the figure that says the most is a different one. On linkages, that is, on cooperation between firms, universities and institutions, Romania scores low. Cooperation among small innovative firms has a score close to zero. This is the part that an inventory cannot buy. Innovation depends not only on how much we have, but on how well we connect with one another, and this is where the deeper problem of the Romanian system shows.
An innovation ecosystem is, ultimately, a network in which universities, firms, research institutes, funders, local administrations, civic organisations and people influence one another. The triple helix model by Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff describes the productive link between university, industry and government. The model was later extended with a fourth strand, society and citizens, precisely because real innovation calls for participation, not just three institutions signing protocols. The World Bank, in a 2026 assessment, describes the Romanian ecosystem as fragmented, underfunded and poorly coordinated. The diagnosis is not a lack of ideas or creative energy, but a lack of links between them.
For young people, the difference is direct. In an inventory, they are a resource to be trained. In a network, they are partners who can contribute from the start. A student who works on a real project, alongside an industry mentor and a professor, learns something different, and in a different way, from one who only listens to lectures. These links are not bought, they are built, year after year, with patience.
What universities do and what more they can do
The university is the institution closest to young people that can make the shift from an exposed category to an actor. The good news is that this process has already begun in several university centres.
If we look only at recent years, through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, Romanian universities were allocated EUR 234 million for digitalisation, funds for which 61 institutions were selected. POLITEHNICA Bucharest coordinatesthe Romanian Artificial Intelligence HUB, a 336 million lei project bringing together several partner universities. ICI and POLITEHNICA Bucharest contribute to the European artificial intelligence infrastructure through RO AI Factory. In Cluj, the Technical University began construction in 2024 of the country’s first artificial intelligence research institute. In Timișoara, the West University built an innovation and technology transfer centre and the U-InnoVaTe programme, while in Iași, the Gheorghe Asachi Technical University and the University of Medicine and Pharmacy power the Digital Innovation Zone, a regional hub for AI and advanced technologies. The University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Timișoara built a digital library with AI in which more than 7,900 students can practise on clinical cases generated by an algorithm. Many Romanian universities are today part of European alliances such as EELISA, CIVIS, UNITA, EUt+ or FORTHEM, which bring mobility, joint programmes and access to research networks.
These investments matter. But equipment is the relatively easy part. The question is what a university does with it, and here experience points to three directions worth pursuing.
The first is openness to society. A university that invites firms, organisations and the community into its laboratories creates exactly the links that are otherwise missing from the ecosystem. Mentoring programmes, projects commissioned by companies, and internships mean a great deal to a graduate. This is also where the vulnerable link of Romanian universities comes in: technology transfer. Romania has much ground to make up on the connections between research and the market; we have few patents and few firms born out of laboratories. The World Bank recommends that universities treat the commercialisation of research as a profession, with permanent offices, clear intellectual property rules and budgets for prototypes, rather than as a task left to researchers.
The second direction is teaching about AI, and with AI, critically rather than merely instrumentally. It is not enough to teach young people to give commands to a model. They need to understand the technical, social and economic logic of these systems, how they work as products and in whose interest they are built. In this way, students can avoid becoming users who are, in fact, used by AI. The aim is to remain people who put technology at their service, not the other way around.
The third direction is building bridges between regions. The internal gap is large. Bucharest-Ilfov innovates at 59% of the European average and is the only region in the top tier, while the rest of the regions stand between 23% and 37%, according to the Regional Innovation Scoreboard 2025. A university in Craiova, Sibiu or Galați that equips its laboratories and connects its students to local firms helps strengthen the fabric of Romanian innovation and keeps young people in the country.
The missing link, from idea to company
When we look at events, Romania is rich in innovation. Hackathons, competitions, workshops, entrepreneurship clubs: all of these exist and are alive. Innovation Labs, the acceleration programme launched in 2013, links a network of 25 universities across 13 cities, taking teams of young people from an idea, through a hackathon and ten weeks of mentoring, to a viable product and multiple opportunities to present before investors, journalists and future partners.
Innovation Labs is an incubator of innovative, technology-based businesses, numbering more than 50 such active ventures valued cumulatively at over EUR 200 million, with 10 exits. Examples of success stories built on home-grown capital are not in short supply. Among them are Rayscape, which is revolutionising medical imaging through artificial intelligence, OxidOS, Pentest-Tools.com, VAUNT and Linnify, companies that have attracted investments of millions of euros, created products used worldwide and contribute to consolidating a Romanian technology ecosystem that is competitive internationally.
Junior Achievement Romania reaches more than 300,000 young people each year from over 1,900 institutions. The Startarium platform brings together tens of thousands of entrepreneurs at the start of their journey. Accelerators such as Orange Fab, Techcelerator, Commons Accel, or Make IT in Oradea provide the mentoring so necessary to facilitate the transfer of knowledge from industry to aspiring founders and to increase cohesion in the ecosystem.
The problem, then, is not a lack of entry gates, but what happens once you pass through them. This is where the missing link shows. The initial product idea matures only with difficulty into a product whose market potential has been validated by users, or into a prototype. The prototype runs into bureaucratic difficulties in becoming a company, the company cannot find its first financing, and the young founder is left without support at every transition from one stage to the next. Venture capital investments in Romanian startups reached a record level of around EUR 130 million in 2024, after which they fell towards EUR 103 million in 2025, according to reports from How to Web. These are figures higher than they were a decade ago, but small relative to the need, and the scarcest part of the funding chain remains early-stage financing.
The funding programme Innotech Student, subsidised from European funds, had more than 22,000 students as beneficiaries and led to the creation of over 1,300 companies in the previous round, yet it reaches only a small part of those it targets. A new instrument, the Innovation Romania Fund, launched by the European Investment Fund together with the state, with an envelope of up to EUR 100 million, targets precisely this link: technology transfer, accelerators and co-investment. If it works, it will fill a significant gap, both for early-stage financing and for deep-tech.
Romania does not lack talent, but rather a resilient fabric to its innovation network, a sense of continuity. An event energises a team, a network of mentors guides it, and institutions and capital (preferably mature capital specialised in innovation) carry the idea further. Innovation needs an unbroken chain, from school to prototype, from prototype to company, from company to growth.
We already have well-known examples that talent exists and can go far. UiPath, launched in 2005 in Bucharest by Daniel Dines, became the most valuable software company in the region and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021, though with its headquarters moved to the United States. Bitdefender, founded likewise in Bucharest and remaining at home, demonstrates the scenario in which global growth enriches the local ecosystem.
An innovation paradigm that leaves no one behind
Who reaches these opportunities today? For the most part, young people who already have three advantages: they live in urban areas, they have a certain digital ease, and they have access to technical or English-language networks. The rest remain at the edge of the map.
Young people in rural areas remain poorly connected to opportunity, even where the internet infrastructure exists. Students outside computer science and engineering have few entry gates, even though the need for innovation exists just as much in health, education, public services or adaptation to environmental change. Women are increasingly present in technology and cybersecurity programmes, yet the circles of founders and investors remain largely male and urban, since globally startups founded exclusively by women attract around 2-3% of venture capital, and in Romania women have founded only a few hundred of the thousands of registered startups, even if strictly national data are still fragmented. And the NEET rate mentioned at the outset, the highest in the Union, shows how many young people are pushed outside the paths of learning and of creating social and economic value.
The good news is that inclusion has begun to be treated as part of innovation policy, not as a separate concern. The First-in-Family Student programme, funded from European funds with over EUR 104 million, supports students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Through the NRRP, more than a hundred libraries have been transformed into digital skills points, and over a thousand have received equipment. Programmes such as UNbreakable Romania open up the field of cybersecurity for thousands of pupils and students, with dedicated tracks for girls as well. These are measures that broaden the base from which innovation starts. Their only limit is scale, still too small relative to the size of the gaps.
What Romania needs
On paper, the Romanian state has a National Strategy on Artificial Intelligence, adopted in 2024, and an inter-ministerial coordination commission. What it lacks is a single “owner”, endowed with a mandate and real levers, because responsibility for the direction of innovation and, within it, for artificial intelligence is divided among dozens of institutions, without any one of them truly being accountable. The World Bank makes the same observation about the entire ecosystem, when it finds that no authority is, in fact, responsible for innovation. This dilution of accountability is real and costly. Still, if we see innovation as a social process, then no ministry, however well run, will be enough on its own.
Romania needs the social infrastructure of innovation. It needs more connections, and more trust, between actors who today do not meet. It needs an education that does not leave half of its children below the baseline. It needs institutions that carry an idea from one stage to the next without losing it along the way. The state sets the direction, the university trains and connects, firms take ideas to market, funders support their growth, but without the sustained involvement of people, especially young people, the chain breaks at the first weak link.
Concretely, three things would move the needle. The first is technology transfer treated as a profession, not as an activity left to the goodwill of researchers, with permanent offices in universities, clear intellectual property rules and budgets for prototypes, which the World Bank also recommends. The second is a national innovation coordinator with a real mandate and budget, accountable for direction, not just a commission that exists on paper. The third is instruments dedicated to the scarcest stage, early-stage financing, where the prototype most often dies today, and where the Innovation Romania Fund is a promising start.
We have someone to learn from. Estonia linked its technical universities to a digital education begun as early as kindergarten and reached the highest density of startups per capita in Europe. The Republic of Moldova built the EVO application, which brings public services together in a single place, has already issued more than 200,000 digital documents and is now connecting to the European digital identity wallet, and its lesson is not about an application, but about coordination. We see how a public agency, universities and private partners were brought together to work as one, building precisely the social infrastructure we lack. Finland created Aalto University from the merger of a technical university, an economics university and an art and design university, deliberately bringing together precisely the disciplines that here rarely meet on one campus. On this multidisciplinary platform, students then built their own entrepreneurial culture from the ground up, from the Aaltoes society to the Slush conference, which became one of the largest startup events in the world. The state provided the structure, and young people filled it with energy. All these examples are forms of social organisation that invite young people to set their ideas in motion on a lasting trajectory.
Reasonable optimism
I am optimistic, but in moderation. Optimistic because the strength of young people is real, because universities are tying their students ever more closely to industry and to society, because Europe is a great laboratory in which we are welcome and which supports us. In moderation, because none of this happens on its own.
And what we owe young people is not a promise, but continuity, that is, links that hold, institutions that carry their ideas further, and a place on the map from which they no longer wish to leave.