Beyond Horizon: Science and competitiveness brief

Universities, think tanks and other organisations from across Europe have launched a new project to bridge fragmentation in European science diplomacy. The project is funded under the Horizon Europe programme and is a direct response to the European Commission’s and the European Council’s calls for a European framework for science diplomacy.  

Entitled “Consolidating European Science Diplomacy”, the Horizon Europe-funded project was launched on June 1. It will hold its first consortium meeting in Vienna on June 9 and 10.    

The project intends to map Europe’s science diplomacy ecosystem, build an online science diplomacy hub and help train diplomats, science counsellors, policymakers and researchers. 

More on the project here. 

The European Commission’s 2026 European Semester spring package recommends EU member states to foster public and private R&D investment and improve business-academia cooperation as “shortfalls persist” in closing the innovation gap with global rivals. 

The Commission advises Czechia, Spain, France and Poland “to deepen knowledge transfer, support innovation uptake, and provide an innovation-friendly environment for start-ups and scale-ups,” while Denmark, one of Europe’s innovation frontrunners, “is encouraged to further strengthen SME innovation, technology diffusion, and access to growth financing.” 

Recommendations also include incentivising women to enroll in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and information and communications technology fields. 

More details here. 

Innovation procurement has the potential to strengthen European competitiveness but remains underused across the 27-member bloc, according to a report by the European Commission. 

Not only most EU member states still lack action plans and targets to boost innovation procurement, but the EU’s dedicated procedures are not efficient to boost investments, “because conservative public buyers simply keep choosing not to use those procedures,” the report reads. 

More details here. 

Some EU member states have been investing more in R&D, but disparities persist, according to the European Research Area (ERA) scoreboard.

The document notes more investments and reforms in countries and regions with lower R&I performance. However, convergence between the member states has slowed in recent years. Widening countries such as Poland, Romania and Slovakia show long-term improvements, but other countries show signs of decline in R&D intensity.

More details here. 

The European Commission has appointed a scientific panel and an advisory forum to advise its artificial intelligence office and national authorities on applying rules of the AI Act. 

The scientific panel is composed of 60 independent experts with experience in frontier AI, engineering, technical auditing, industry and societal impact, whereas the advisory forum will provide technical expertise, including on standardisation and implementation. 

Members of the two bodies will be serving two-year terms. 

More details here. 

The European Parliament has proposed a €47.39 billion budget for the next Erasmus+, well above the Commission's €40.8 billion proposal, but still short of the €60 billion universities requested. 

Europe’s university and student association have jointly welcomed the proposal but warned that the programmes draft education and training budget share is more than six percentage points lower than under the current programme. 

The draft report for the next Erasmus+, due to start in 2028, introduces minimum budget allocations for different programme areas, giving universities and other beneficiaries greater transparency and planning certainty for the first time. 

The Parliament also proposes co-funding arrangements with the European Competitiveness Fund for strategic scholarships and stronger support for European Universities alliances, aligning with longstanding sector requests. 

Read the draft report here, and the joint university association position paper here. 

Emmanuel Macron’s Choose France investment push is bearing fruit, with Japan’s tech giant SoftBank committing €45 billion this week to a 3.1-gigawatt AI data centre in the country.  

A further investment of up to €75 billion is also in the works to further boost AI data centre capacity in France. 

The move was announced as part of this year’s Choose France summit in which the country bids to attract foreign investment, with SoftBank’s €45 billion push making up the bulk of the €93 billion committed this year. 

“AI is entering a new era, and the countries that build the infrastructure for this transformation will shape the future of technology, industry and society,” said Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of SoftBank. “France is uniquely positioned to become a leading AI infrastructure hub in Europe.” 

The Research Council of Finland is financing the recruitment of nine professors from abroad in seven Finnish universities as part of a drive to attract top talent.  

The funding will allow seven universities to employ the professors for five years, financing their move to Finland from the US, Canada and France, among other countries. 

The European Commission has unveiled a new scoreboard with data on how EU member states compare on metrics like founders per capita and venture capital funding as a percentage of GDP. 

The European Startup and Scaleup Scoreboard covers the period 2020-25, and looks at a total of 36 indicators. 

Estonia boasts 615 venture capital backed firms per million inhabitants, the highest score in the EU. Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and Denmark are also listed as strong performers. 

But the scoreboard names Greece, Latvia, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Romania as “rising” countries, struggling with weak venture capital access, fragmented regulations, slow administration, and brain drain. 

Nordic rectors’ conferences publish joint paper on FP10 and ECF 

The rectors’ conferences of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden have published a shared vision of the ongoing negotiations over the next European Framework Programme for research and innovation, FP10, and its links to the European Competitiveness Fund (ECF). 

Many of their priorities reflect the views of the wider European university sector, including a €220 billion budget, avoiding any directionality in the European Research Council and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, and preserving support in Pillar 2 for collaborative research at low technology readiness levels. 

The paper also highlights the importance of Arctic research, which is highly relevant to the Nordic countries, and suggests introducing an “Arctic partnership” in the future research programme. 

Read the full paper here.