Seeking big ideas in EU R&D? Look beyond the usual suspects, says John Whitfield
You don’t have to spend long working in research policy before the same few names crop up again and again.
Lots of grand challenges apparently demand a moonshot, aping the Apollo programme’s textbook mission-oriented triumph.
Many places want to be a Silicon somewhere, brewing the mix of startups and venture capital that made a Californian valley famous.
Envious glances are often cast at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institutes and their knack for getting academic work into the market.
And governments all over want their own Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, to mimic that US military R&D agency’s track record of spawning game-changing innovations.
But you don’t have to read many studies of research policy to realise that what works for one place, sector or problem does not easily transfer.
Darpa is a specialised symbiont of the US Department of Defense that is not easily adapted to other hosts. Not many countries have Germany’s industrial base. There is still only one Silicon Valley and it is not what it was. And few grand challenges have a goal so obvious that it lights up the night sky.
Success through simplicity
The fame and relative complexity of these research-related brands hint at the difficulties inherent in matching them. Sometimes, success is better delivered through simplicity.
The European Research Council and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions are understood, liked and respected. They are also basically old-school, peer review-powered grant funders that try to fund the best proposals they get.
The ERC has become arguably the last big win in EU research policy since it launched in 2007 under Framework 7, predecessor of the Horizon programmes.
The big idea for Horizon 2020, the following programme, was a set of billion-euro Flagship projects in areas such as the human brain and graphene. This approach has been dropped.
Of the novelties in the current Horizon Europe programme, missions have underwhelmed and the European Innovation Council has struggled. Both deserve time to bed down. The ERC faced political resistance and its creation had “more to do with luck than strategic brilliance”, to quote the research policy expert Thomas König.
But it is perhaps telling that defining the missions might need a book, whereas the ERC can be described on the back of an envelope. And as Horizon Europe reaches its midway point, there is a sense that it is an essential but underperforming, embattled programme.
Three-quarters of high-quality proposals go unfunded, member states want to trim its budget and money has been diverted to support the European Chips Act. Much of the European research community is sounding like the old Woody Allen joke: the food here is terrible and the portions are too small.
Coming from groups representing universities and researchers, some of this is priced in. But those within the EU institutions are also speaking out, with ERC president Maria Leptin challenging the EU to put its money where its mouth is and Marc Lemaître, the European Commission’s top R&D official, warning that Europe’s innovation efforts lag behind those of the US and China.
Shaping the future
Complaints about Horizon Europe are also attempts to shape its successor, launching in 2028. The debate around the budget and design of the next programme began in earnest this year and will kick up a gear in the autumn, when the Commission is set to appoint an expert group of advisers to begin brainstorming its R&D policy.
Every Commission wants to leave its mark rather than just keep what it inherits ticking over. The good news is that there’s plenty of scope for big ideas in EU R&D policy without adding to the already large suite of top-down programmes with specified goals.
The EU could look at lottery funding models, at core funding for institutions or at basic research income for individual investigators. It could launch a fast and nimble grants scheme adapted from the crisis-mode research funding used in the pandemic.
It could try to spread research funds more evenly, based on evidence that the increasing concentration of resources seen in recent decades has led to diminishing returns. Part of this could involve doubling down on emerging efforts to give early career researchers the autonomy and job security that, surveys show, they value more than salary alone.
The importance of allowing failure in research is universally recognised. By learning from it, Europe could maybe add some new names to the research policy canon.
John Whitfield is opinion editor at Research Professional News
This article also appeared in Research Europe