How does Christina Rebel, CEO of CAD ROOMS, argue that Europe's push for industrial sovereignty through the EU Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) and "Made in EU" requirements must extend upstream to include the tools, data infrastructure, skills, and supply chains behind hardware

Christina Rebel, CEO of CAD ROOMS, argues that Europe’s push for industrial sovereignty through the Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) and “Made in EU” requirements must go beyond the factory floor and extend upstream to the tools, data infrastructure, skills, and supply chains that enable hardware development itself . She warns that without addressing these foundational layers, the IAA risks being a hollow demand-side policy that fails to build genuine European hardware capacity .

Here are the specific challenges she identifies:

• Legacy engineering software lock-in – European hardware teams still rely almost entirely on CAD and engineering software built by non-EU companies, creating a hidden dependency that a “Made in EU” label on the final product does not fix .
• Hardware financing gaps – Europe is strong at funding early-stage R&D and deep tech, but much weaker at creating domestic markets and providing the later-stage capital that hardware startups need to scale production .
• China’s ecosystem advantage – China benefits from an integrated hardware ecosystem where tools, supply chains, manufacturing capacity, and skills are tightly coupled, giving it a structural speed and cost advantage that Europe cannot match with demand-side measures alone .