Looking back and ahead
Neth-ER, the Brussels-based association of eleven Dutch organisations working in the field of research, innovation and education, provides input to the ongoing evaluations of Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe with its position paper Looking at the Horizon and Beyond. Neth-ER and its members
wish to voice their enthusiasm for the past and present European framework programmes for research & innovation (R&I). Looking ahead, four particular areas demand attention for the future: a robust budget, the maintenance of excellence & impact as overarching objectives of the programme, the recognition that international collaboration through the programme is vital for its objectives, and programme simplification to avoid fragmentation and duplication. Neth-ER looks forward to helping shape the future of the programme together with European institutions, national governments, and stakeholder organisations.
Budget
The framework programme pushes the frontier of knowledge which makes Horizon instrumental in advancing the EU’s political, economic and societal goals at the global stage. The Lamy report called in 2017 for doubling the Horizon Europe budget compared to its predecessor. A significantly higher budget remains of the utmost important to enable the framework programme to effectively attain its objectives in the long term. In the next Multi-Annual Financial Framework, a modern, forward-looking multi-annual R&I budget of at least 200 billion euros is therefore needed. In addition, the stability of the budget should be secured through ringfencing. The recent trend towards siphoning off funds from Horizon to finance new political priorities seriously harms its stability and predictability. When new ambitions and expectations are added to the programme, commensurate new funds should be too.
Excellence & impact
The excellence criterion ensures only the best R&I proposals are funded, while the impact criterion ensures that European R&I achievements have impact way beyond the lifetime of a project. The simultaneous application of both criteria in the programme is crucial for strengthening Europe’s knowledge base, and they should therefore remain the overarching objectives of the programme. Furthermore, fundamental research, applied research and innovation should exist in a complementary equilibrium, which means the programme should proportionally offer opportunities for all these types of R&I. Additionally, to safeguard excellence and impact across the programme, the end goal must be that the widening instrument becomes superfluous. To move closer towards this goal, national investments and reforms, as well as peer support, are to accompany actions at the European level and should not be restricted to the framework programme alone.
International cooperation
R&I are inherently international. International collaboration through association agreements with like-minded third countries is therefore vital to commonly advance the global R&I agenda. The EU cannot afford the persistent non-association of the United Kingdom and Switzerland. This outcome is at odds with the broader strategic goals of the Union. Furthermore, while the ambition to open up association to more countries is positive, progress on this front has been disappointingly limited to date. The next framework programme should avoid delays in association as much as possible and truly live up to the principle of being as open as possible. The fast-track procedure for previously associated countries should be retained. A revived emphasis on international collaboration should be accompanied by appropriate attention to foreign interference, thus adhering to the principle ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’.
Programme simplification
Despite the announced ambition towards simplification, Horizon Europe is more complex than Horizon 2020. Programme-level simplification should therefore firstly be addressed at the political level, where new instruments and priorities are discussed. Secondly, operational improvements would allow individual instruments to be more focused. Enabling instruments to focus on their respective strengths has become more difficult due to the surge in horizontal requirements. Given the vast size of the programme, not all instruments need to be a jack of all trades. Providing more focus will improve the accessibility of different parts of the programme, thereby enabling currently underrepresented groups (for instance universities of applied science, vocational education & training providers and SMEs) to showcase excellence and impact. In addition, simplification concerns carefully reviewing the added value of relatively newer instruments, such as the Bauhaus, the missions and the EIT.
Context
Neth-ER expands on the previous points in its position paper. The paper has been prepared in the context of the ongoing consultation by the European Commission on the final evaluation of Horizon 2020, the interim evaluation of Horizon Europe and the second Strategic Plan of Horizon Europe, which runs from 2025 to 2027. This consultation ends on February 23 and is one of the first building blocks towards the next framework programme (FP10), which is supposed to start in 2028. For more information on the trajectory towards FP10, please consult the following article (in Dutch).
