Home>Sakurako Maki Paired up With Two Bocconi Students to Win the FuturEU Policy Competition

24.06.2025

Sakurako Maki Paired up With Two Bocconi Students to Win the FuturEU Policy Competition

Sakurako Maki, a Master's student at Sciences Po Paris School of International Affairs, Leonardo Gallo, and Italo Parrilli, Master's students at Bocconi University, winners of the 2025 futurEU policy competition. (credits: Hertie School / CIVICA)

The three winners in front of a screen where the topic is written "Now or Never: Enhancing EU Competitiveness". — Sakurako Maki, a Master's student at Sciences Po Paris School of International Affairs, Leonardo Gallo, and Italo Parrilli, Master's students at Bocconi University, winners of the 2025 futurEU policy competition. (credits: Hertie School / CIVICA)

Sakurako Maki, a Master's student at our Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA), paired up with Leonardo Gallo and Italo Parrilli, Master's students at Bocconi University, for the 2025 futurEU policy competition. This year's topic was “NOW OR NEVER: Enhancing EU Competitiveness”.

On 16 May, they were crowned winners of the 5th edition, during the finals at the Hertie School (Berlin), with their policy brief addressing Europe’s innovation challenges.

What is the futurEU Competition?

The futurEU Competition is an opportunity for all students of CIVICA, our European university alliance, to research, explore, and network with each other. More importantly, the Competition is a platform that encourages students to actively find and propose policy solutions on reforming the European Union. The competition is open to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as PhD researchers, enrolled at one of the 10 CIVICA partner universities.

> Want to learn more about the winning team? Read their interview.

What is your proposal about?

Our proposal focuses on the potential of university-centred technology hubs to turn academic breakthroughs into scalable start-ups and market applicable technology. Drawing inspiration from successful models like Silicon Valley, we explored how Europe could enhance its competitiveness – particularly in competence with other global leaders such as the U.S. and China – through better integration between research and commercialisation.

Furthermore, under the current geopolitical context, we thought that strengthening technology breakthrough and scaling it up with university-centred start-up hubs would be the solution to ensure EU competitiveness and a greater consistency in the allocation of funds.

How did you proceed?

We first identified the flaw in the current fund allocation scheme in the EU and found out potential cause of obstacles of scaling up the European start-ups. For example, despite a modest 0.6% improvement in innovation performance between 2023 and 2024, systemic barriers continue to impede effective technology transfer.

The ambitious goals for 2030 set by the European Commission remain unreachable, lacking a dedicated policy to bridge this gap. This gap is our main focus and the challenge we tackled through our policy brief.

During the development of our policy brief, we encountered some challenges, namely designing a concrete and feasible roadmap of the funding scheme. However, by gaining insights from current innovation funding such as the European Innovation Council (EIC) and incorporating the measurable evaluation system for the funded projects, we ended up dividing the entire programme in three stages based on the programme’s timeline.

Overall, how was your futurEU experience?

Taking part in the futurEU Competition and discussing with the other teams from across Europe was a great experience. We strongly believe in technological innovation and we look forward to seeing how ideas like ours can contribute to shaping the future of European competitiveness.