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

More than 1000 students in Spain will be able to secure loans for their education and training as well as career coaching and support thanks to a €4 million agreement between the European Investment Fund and the fintech company, StudentFinance.

The company, which received backing from the Fund, is building a tool allowing all kinds of education providers, from boot camps to universities, to offer deferred payment schemes to their students.

Today’s deal will serve more than 100 students in Spain, which will be able to repay their loans when they get a job and earn above a certain pre-determined amount. In the future, StudentFinance hopes to offer its services to students in Germany, Belgium, Poland, Italy and the Netherlands.

“Education and skills are key elements to promote economic efficiency, social inclusion, growth, competitiveness and, of course, self-development, all in the context of an ever-changing world,” said Alain Godard, chief of the European Investment Fund. “The agreement signed with StudentFinance goes exactly in this direction, enabling students to invest in their future while offering targeted training opportunities, career coaching and mentoring.”

The European Commission expects to spend €13.1 billion on research and innovation in 2022, with most of the funding, €12.2 billion, set to come from the EU research programme, Horizon Europe.

How most of this money will be spent will be outlined in the Horizon Europe work programmes, due to be published in the coming few weeks.

On top of the proposed budget, R&I projects could  see €1.8 billion top-up coming from the €750 billion EU recovery fund.

Overall, the proposed research spending makes up almost 8% of the funding of the EU’s €167.8 billion budget for 2022 revealed today.

The European Commission should launch the next call for new EU-supported university alliances next year, says the university association, the Coimbra Group.

If it waits until 2024, the project seeking to form cross-border university alliances across the EU will lose momentum, making it more difficult “to maintain the levels of cooperation and inclusiveness”, according to the group’s statement.

There are currently 41 university alliances testing the waters. In the next seven years, the Commission hopes to roll our and scale up these networks which will key in building up EU cooperation in education. The next call, funded by Erasmus+, will add more alliances to the mix.

The Coimbra Group also encourages the Commission to stick to the principles of flexibility, inclusiveness, creativity and bottom-up nature as the project evolves and calls for extended and long-term funding to follow the pilot phase of the alliances.

The European Research Council, the EU’s frontier research funder, has presented a new plan for boosting gender equality in its bottom-up calls for projects in the EU research programme, Horizon Europe.

In the next seven years, the ERC hopes to attract more female applicants than before. In Horizon 2020, 28% of all applicants were female. In the previous seven-year programme, women made up a third of all applicants. Now, the ERC wants to further boost the figures.

While the pool of female applicants is limited, “where we hope to advance in the next few years is understanding what makes highly qualified women, who are already in that pool, not apply for ERC grants, and then developing targeted encouragement actions for them,” said Barbara Romanowicz, member of the ERC Scientific Council and chair of its Gender Issues Working Group.

The new plan largely mirrors its Horizon 2020 predecessor, but this time the agency’s toolbox for fighting gender inequality will be strengthened by “ERC ambassadors”, members of the Scientific Council and volunteer grantees who will help promote gender equality at events and forums.

The European Innovation Council (EIC) has launched a new mentorship programme to help women entrepreneurs enhance their skills and network.

The scheme is open to all women that are part of EIC-funded projects, but this time around, only 50 of them will be able to secure tailor-made training with personal mentors and coaches. In the future, the mentorships will be extended to women from outside the EIC circle as part of  the WomanTechEU programme foreseen to be launched in late June.

To mark the launch of the mentoring scheme, on the same day, the EIC advisory board called on the EIC and other organisations to act now to achieve gender balance in the innovation ecosystem.

The European Commission has picked the 72 winners of its €1 billion Green Deal call for research tackling the climate crisis – the last big Horizon 2020 funding call.

The 72 selected proposals bring together almost 1800 research, public, private and civil society organisations to tackle challenges such as the green energy transition, circular economy, energy efficient buildings, sustainable mobility and preserving biodiversity.

The projects were selected out of 1550 candidates and are expected to sign grant agreement this September.

Germany today announced it will invest €350 million in cybersecurity research in the next five years to boost the country’s digital security and technology sovereignty in the field.

“The connected world has a major impact on each and every one of us, but also on society as a whole. Without IT security, we cannot be sure that our tap is still running, the subway is running, a transfer will arrive correctly,“ said the country’s science minister Anja Karlizcek.  “Without IT security, we cannot be sure that our democracy will work.”

The new framework will address seven cybersecurity challenges, including data protection, a safe and stable digital democracy, boosting German industry competitiveness, and training and attracting talent.

Germany’s new programme launches as the EU looks to raise its game in cybersecurity, rolling out a new cybersecurity centre in Bucharest that will fund research and coordinate 27 national cybersecurity centres in Europe.  

Science Europe, an association of research organisations and funders, today released a new guide for research funders, performers, and data infrastructures on how to ensure their research data can be easily shared and re-used.

The guide seeks to help organisations evaluate their data policies and practices as well as support the development of new rules and align them with the practices of other organisations – leading to easier data sharing and more open science.

“Open Science builds on the fundamental features of research and innovation: transparency, openness, verification, and reproducibility. It should be deeply embedded within the practice of research but to achieve such change, appropriate policies and practices must be in place throughout the whole research and innovation system,” said Melanie Welham, executive chair UK Research and Innovation and member of the Science Europe Governing Board, in the guide’s foreword.

From 28 June to 9 July the European Commission will hold the first Horizon Europe info-days where applicants will have the chance to learn about the ins and outs of the new research programme.

The ten-day event will signal the long-awaited kick-off of the new research programming as work programmes detailing the calls for the next two years are expected to be officially released around the same time.

The end of June will also see the Commission’s R&I days, a flagship conference for research and innovation policy. This year, the conference was moved from September to June, closer to the launch of the Horizon Europe.

The info webinars will cover nine different parts of Horizon Europe, including all six topic clusters, such as climate and digital, as well as financing for infrastructures, researcher exchanges, and EU widening activities for engaging researchers from countries that tend to get less EU research funding.

European equity funding for artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies currently make only 7% of total global spending. The EU must act quick to avoid lagging behind the US and China in the global technology race, a new study from the European Investment Bank finds.

To catch up, the EU must boost investments in AI and blockchain development and scale-up, improve their market take-up and develop an integrated European innovation ecosystem, the report recommends.

In 2020, the European Commission launched its own €100 million AI/Blockchain investment fund and a support programme for investors. In the new seven-year EU budget, the ambition will be scaled-up.

Yet, investments in private sector are still geographically unbalanced and too low compared to other countries. While the US and China account for 80% of the €25 billion annual equity investments in AI and blockchain technologies, the EU makes up merely 7% of spending, investing around €1.75 million.