HORIZON BLOG: European R&D policy newsbytes (Archived_02)

The proposal to cut €166 million from the 2024 Horizon Europe budget by the Council of the European Union is “appalling”, according to the Netherlands House for Education and Research (Neth-ER). 

The Dutch association is calling on the European Parliament to stand against this decision and fight for a higher budget for the EU’s flagship R&I programme. 

“The persistent trend towards syphoning off funds from Horizon is completely unacceptable and should come to a halt as soon as possible,” Neth-ER has written in a statement.

EIT Digital, a community of tech-focused firms, and the European Innovation Council (EIC) have announced that they have struck a series of new partnerships to help European start-ups. 

Following a pilot year of collaboration, the two organisations said that firms that win funding from the EIC will have funded access to five different EIT Digital services. 

These include training programmes to help them access the US market; a scheme to enable them to raise venture capital funding; and involvement in a network that allows them to hire EIT Digital students as interns. 

Scientific collaboration is a global endeavour and should now be "weaponised and exploited as a mere bargaining chip", said Antonio Loprieno, president of All European Academies (ALLEA).

In a statement published on Monday, Loprieno said the EU-UK deal on Horizon Europe association is a landmark moment. However, he calls on policy makers to "refrain from using research as a pawn in political spats".

The full statement is available here. 

EARTO, the European Association of Research and Technology Organisations, has outlined six strategic issues to consider in discussion about the next big EU research programme, due to start in 2028. 

The six issues include encouraging more policy integration within the programme, bringing more stability to its budget, reflecting on the management set up, improving implementation and simplifying how it all works. A sector-specific demand call to pilot targeted support for technology infrastructures.  

The statement is geared at EU member states representatives at the European Research Area and Innovation Committee (ERAC), who are set to discuss the future research framework in a meeting next month. 

The Portuguese government has launched a new €8 million six-year research and innovation programme for defence. 

The programme will deliver joint research projects, doctoral education and advanced training as it boosts coordination between the country’s armed forces and research centres.  

The move comes as countries around Europe bolster their defence funding in response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, including upping targeted research and innovation spending. 

More such partnerships are to follow to stimulate innovation and development in other government-supported sectors in the country.   

UK and Singapore have signed a new strategic partnership, which will include enhanced cooperation on research, development and innovation.  

Agreed in the margins of the G20 summit in India, the new partnerships lay the groundwork for a new bilateral investment treaty. The UK hopes the agreement will help harness expertise in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. 

EIT Innoenergy, an EU-backed energy innovation community, has raised €140 million in private investment which it hopes will double its impact.  

EIT Innoenergy supports a portfolio of companies it hopes to help grow with the extra funding. Since 2010, the innovation community has supported thousands of start-ups and students, which have launched more than 300 products to market and filed more than 370 patents. 

The investment is welcome news as EIT Innoenergy approaches the final year of its financing contract with its parent EU agency, the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT).  

Investors include Societe Generale, Santander CIB, Renault Group, Stena Recycling, Siemens Financial Services, Schneider Electric, Capgemini, Volkswagen Group, ING, Koolen Industries, Engie and others.  

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Helmholtz Munich have started a new project seeking to leverage machine learning methods to take advantage of the recent explosion of genomics data. 

“Despite an explosion in biological data, the technology sector remains the key driver of machine learning advances today,” said Caroline Uhler. “[Both institutes] are seeking to change that by developing foundations of machine learning that are geared specifically to biological problems, and we’re excited for this collaboration to amplify our efforts.” 

Joint efforts will include a range of activities, including the exchange of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and other research staff. 

The EU-supported supercomputing partnership EuroHPC today launched its seventh supercomputer, Deucalion, in the Azurém Campus, Guimarães, Portugal. 

The supercomputer’s peak performance is 10 Petaflops, or 10 million billion calculations per second, making it the most powerful computer in the country. It will be used to advance research and innovation in energy efficient technologies, weather forecasts, seas and oceans, drug discovery, new materials design and neuroscience, among others. 

The computer cost €20 million, €7 million of which came from EU funds. The other EuroHPC supercomputers are located in Bulgaria, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Czechia, Italy and Finland.  

The European Commission’s portfolio for the head of research, innovation and education keeps switching hands and has now landed on the desk of vice-president Margaritis Schinas.  

This is a temporary solution. The portfolio will be taken over by Iliana Ivanova by the end of the month, pending European Parliament’s approval. She successfully auditioned for the job in a Parliament hearing on Tuesday. 

Schinas was named caretaker of the wide-ranging portfolio after its previous caretaker Margrethe Vestager, commissioner for digital, temporary withdrew from her work to run president of the European Investment Bank.  

Other parts of Vestager’s portfolio will be taken over by commissioners Vera Jourová and Didier Reynders.