Focus on early-stage research urged for Horizon successor

Talk in Brussels is turning to the European Union’s next research and development programme, which will run from 2028 to 2034 – and while much remains undecided, a consensus is forming that it needs to focus more on early-stage research.

For the past 10 months, a committee co-chaired by the European Commission and made up of directors general from the science ministries of EU and Horizon Europe-associated countries has been debating the next framework programme, currently known as FP10.

A committee task force is working on a formal position, due to be debated in spring 2024 and formally adopted in June that year.

The group has agreed a “vision” for the programme, which includes its international political context and its overall structure, and they have just began debating the detail, with the “most important” aspect so far being the relative share of fundamental and applied research the programme should fund.

“There are a lot of people who say the balance in Horizon Europe is a bit broken, [that] it went a bit too far towards high TRL, towards knowledge exploitation,” a Brussels embassy science attaché for an influential EU country told Times Higher Education, referring to “technology readiness levels”, a measure of a given technology’s maturity or closeness to market.

EU research programmes have tended to fund more applied work since they began in the mid-1980s, the attaché said, noting that in recent years they had been joined by other sector-specific programmes such as Digital Europe, the European Defence Fund and EU4Health, which also fund research.

According to the attaché, the “fundamental question” was whether the next framework programme should pursue EU goals in these areas, or whether its sister programmes should take on responsibility for sector-specific research.

The European Parliament’s lead on the programmes, Christian Ehler, has called for a €200 billion (£174 billion) budget for FP10, roughly double that of the current programme.

“Either we get a framework programme with €500 billion, and then it can do everything from knowledge creation to knowledge exploitation, or we say, ‘We focus the research programme more on research.’ That’s the dilemma,” the attaché said.

“If we solve the interplay between all the programmes, then a lot of pieces of the puzzle will start to fall into place, including the money.”

The most recent iterations of the programme have had three “pillars”, with the first funding excellent research, the second collaborative projects and the third innovation.

The directors general committee invited university groups and other lobbyists to a meeting in September to give their take on FP10. Laura Keustermans, who represented the League of European Research Universities, and Sarika Wilson, who represented the Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities, said there had been some consensus between the countries and the guests on Horizon Europe’s overly high TRL levels, particularly in the programme’s second pillar.

“There is no balance any more between research and innovation; it’s going too much towards the innovation side. To be able to continue to feed this innovation process, it’s important there is more fundamental research in pillar two,” Ms Keustermans said.

In July last year, Dr Ehler asked the commission to compare the funding for early-stage research in Horizon Europe’s second pillar with that in its predecessor, Horizon 2020, although the officials’ response was equivocal.

Ms Wilson noted that the second pillar had swollen in Horizon Europe to take up half the programme’s overall budget, but that it was increasingly focused on short-term goals.

European universities and science ministries also seem united in their frustration over the flexibility of the framework programmes’ budgets, citing the commission’s ability to pinch funds for pet political projects.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com