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Horizon Europe: Ready for the mission?
It was not long ago that Swiss participation in the European Research Framework Programme was in jeopardy following the SVP initiative on mass immigration. In 2014, nine months after the official launch of Horizon2020, Switzerland was partially-associated and only from the beginning of 2017 fully associated. Now, Horizon2020 is already in its second half and is entering its final highest budget phase.
To date, the University of Basel has acquired 46 Million EUR via Horizon 2020. 16 Researchers have received an ERC grant, 32 Researchers have participated in collaborative projects and 20 young researchers are supported by Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions.
However, the European Commission (EC) is already designing the next European Research Framework Programme, Horizon Europe, which will be running from 2021 to 2027. A first proposal, based on the evaluation of previous framework programmes, expert studies as well as stakeholder and public consultations, is expected to be adopted by the EC in summer 2018. The current budget proposal ranges between 100 and 120 billion Euros, which would make Horizon Europe the biggest research funding programme ever. The European Research and Innovation Strategy will be of great importance to Switzerland and the University of Basel, offering not only attractive funding opportunities, but is also setting trends for the future. The Grants Office has therefore summarised below the most important developments.
The report of the European Parliament Research Services published in April 2018 highlights in particular two new measures expected to be introduced under Horizon Europe:
- First, the European Innovation Council (EIC) will be the strategic initiative to support breakthrough innovation, combining new and existing instruments to address gaps in current EU support for innovation.
- Second, a mission-oriented approach to bring together resources and knowledge from different disciplines is foreseen, merging topdown definitions of bold objectives (possibly aligned with the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals) with instruments supporting bottom-up solutions, to achieve greater impact in tackling societal challenges.
The report “Mission-Oriented Research & Innovation in the European Union – A problem-solving approach to fuel innovation-led growth” published in February 2018, by Prof. Marina Mazzucato gives further insight into the mission-oriented approach. The report is based on various meetings of experts initiated by the EC, with the aim of investigating the opportunities for mission-oriented research and innovation policy in Europe. In its executive summary, Mazzucato notes that the concept of mission-oriented research and innovation derives from the idea that innovation has not only a rate but also a direction. She notes that research and innovation missions must be defined in the context of societal challenges, and suggests to align the programme to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
The report underlines that missions should not prioritise applied research and innovation over fundamental research, which will continue to be funded by instruments like the ERC. Rather, missions are intended to bring together multiple sectors and stimulate multiple forms of cross-discipline and cross-actor collaborations to address a challenge.
The report includes a number of examples of how ‘grand challenges’ such as Citizen Health and Wellbeing, can be broken down into missions, such as ‘Decreasing the burden of dementia’ and individual projects, such as ‘Innovative techniques for personalized diagnosis of Alzeimer’s’, ‘AI support for physical and intellectual patient independence’, or ‘Social standards and caregiving approaches’.
While the "mission oriented approach" will most likely play an important role in the new Research and Innovation Framework Programme, the exact design is still unknown and will certainly lead to many more discussions. However, it seems certain that interdisciplinary research will continue to gain importance in the European research funding landscape. The SNSF is also moving in this direction, for example with the interdisciplinary approach of Sinergia. With regard to Horizon Europe, these developments can be summed up with the following quotation from the Mazzucato report: "Missions should be framed in such way as to spark activity across, and among, multiple scientific disciplines (including social sciences and humanities), across different industrial sectors (e.g. transport, nutrition, health, services), and different types of actors (public, private, third sector, civil organisations).
Grants Office, University of Basel, May 2018
