Stop the R&D train, I want to get off

Go get a cup of coffee. We’re going to talk about what is normally the dullest part of any policy issue: the process. But if you care about how €10 billion a year in R&D money gets spent and on whom, read on.

Here’s the situation. For the past 30 years the European Union has been gradually expanding its role in R&D funding. What began as a few well-intentioned tens of millions on mobile phone and computer research has developed into the world’s second biggest civilian R&D effort (after the US National institutes of Health.)  Now the EU’s Framework Programme 7 helps analyse DNA and social behaviour; it buys spectrometers and carbon-capture demonstrators; it funds conferences and frequent-flier points for scientists and engineers; it studies e.coli biology and e-health system, fission and file protocols.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s still small: The EU budget accounts for 5 per cent of the total that all EU governments spend on R&D. But it’s influential: a young post-doc who wins the European Research Council’s lottery for a grant is suddenly regarded as a Nobel-in-waiting. A funding experiment that appears to have worked in Brussels gets cloned across Europe.

Now here’s the problem: hardly anybody likes the overall results. The official review of Framework Programme 6 (each Framework runs seven overlapping years; we’re now on No. 7 and soon to start No. 8) was damning; noteworthy was its sardonic observation that Framework’s year-plus delays in getting contracts signed was not quite, but close to, worst practice in the world. Any attempt to list truly ground-breaking technologies or discoveries from Brussels starts with the GSM mobile phone standard, and then trails off into a list of no-doubt important but, to most people, unfamiliar advances. Companies and universities that participate in it complain alike of the bureaucracy, the decision-by-committee, the patent rules, the low return for high effort. Corporate participation has dropped to a fourth from a third of the programme, as it becomes primarily a way for university administrators to fill budget holes.

And now here’s the rub: based on that track record, we’re about to get more. We are just starting to plan the next round of funding, FP 8.

That’s why I’m talking about this. At a Brussels conference Science|Business organized Jan. 26 (with the support of Microsoft and the Norwegian Mission to the EU), participants got an exceedingly frank look at the inner processes for FP8 – and many expressed dismay. (The session operated under rules forbidding quotation without permission, so no names are named here.)

The basic process is to evaluate how the current FP7 is working; to identify the good and bad parts; and to expand the former and adjust or kill the latter. That fundamental method is then overlaid by the political whims of the day – currently, that the programme help solve the ‘Grand Challenges’ of climate change, alternative energy and healthcare for the aged (among others), while also inciting more collaboration between industry, academia and government. And don’t forget to simplify the bureaucracy, while you’re at it.

The aim is that, by the start of 2012, the Parliament approves a new FP8. Although there’s a new Commission and Parliament, this process is managed by – for the most part – the same people who managed FP7 and FP6: a small corps of dedicated but beleaguered Eurocrats who work in the different policy silos of the Commission, in the Directorates-General for research, information society, transport and energy, health, education, and industry (to name a few.) Below them toils a small army of project officers, policy officers, scientific advisors, clerks, janitors and thousands of others who turn the cogs in the money machine.

As was evident at the conference, just about everybody involved is fed up with the process. The Commission may propose a new idea that sounds focused, relevant and practical, but it immediately hits the obstacle course of national or private interests. The usual legislative tussle arises, with universities lobbying for more, companies gaming the system, and special-interest groups cutting deals.

That happens in every capital. But in Brussels this system is made more complex by the infighting among the member-states. Represented by a virtually invisible group (called CREST) of mid-level ministry officials from across the EU, the states start pushing to get their fair share of the money – ‘juste retour.’ In no time, the initially simple idea ends up as a chain of compromises.

Now, you can argue the system doesn’t work because the Commission’s ideas are lousy, or undemocratic, or unrealistic. But if so, nobody else’s ideas survive this system intact, either. If Parliament tries to push in a new direction, its own members start carving it up. If a member-state suggests something, other capitals automatically treat it with suspicion. And if an individual academic, executive or investor suggests something, well, forget it if it doesn’t have a built-in collation of supporters across Europe (which is why, by the way, the so-called Joint Technology Initiatives have managed to get off the ground. They are money-sharing clubs.)

So how do you cut through this mess? Here are a few suggestions, some from the conference and some from other sources:

• Break the Commission apparatus up into a series of smaller, quasi-independent agencies. The same fighting will go on, but in many more, smaller battle-fields – increasing the odds of something surprisingly good emerging.

• Fund goals, not research. For instance, pick a goal like curing Alzheimers in our lifetime, and mount a competition to get there among researchers across Europe (and why not the world, too?)

• Fund projects, not programmes. Pick a half dozen monster projects  -  creating a carbon-neutral city - and push virtually all the money towards them, leaving only a few hundred overseers in Brussels to make sure the project managers do what they’re supposed to do.

• Move the budget buckets around, so research money is purely competitive and all the juste-retour programmes get managed elsewhere in the Commission – in effect, quarantining efforts to produce excellent research from the mass of political deal-making. (This was tried in FP7, but not enough or with sufficient clarity.)

There are more possibilities for change. But if we cannot accomplish reform now – with a new Commission, a new Parliament, a new EU treaty, and a continuing economic crisis – when can we ever do so?