This paper is concerned with one of the big issues of our time: the rise of China and India and the challenges which this presents for Europe. It concentrates on the rise of China and India as innovation powers and on their increasingly important role in finding solutions to global climate change.
In both these fields, European business and policy needs to address issues of conflict/competition but also find ways of working together with China and India. And both fields are related to each other in that innovative capacity is essential for mitigating climate change. Ways forward require the ability to define the issues clearly and see them from both the Asian and European side. This is precisely what we sought to achieve at a workshop held in Bonn, 17–18 January 2008. The ambition was to go straight to the frontiers of knowledge and identify the questions which future policy oriented research needs to address.