EU eyes a bigger role in research

Commissioner Potočnik lays out his plans for a debate on whether to expand the EU’s role in R&D

And if he has his way, the interest is going to get even higher: In March, Potočnik said, he plans to open a new, EU-wide debate on expanding collaboration in R&D across Europe – and with other parts of the world.

In preparation, he said, he has started telling scientists, academics and business leaders to get ready for hearings, conferences and other debates that will culminate next year in a set of new proposals. At issue will be whether, among many other things, the EU should step up funding for “big science” infrastructure projects like synchrotrons and DNA databanks, expand its role in student fellowship programmes, and launch more joint R&D projects with other parts of the world.

“Do we dare to go with a higher ambition” for EU research policy? he asked rhetorically in an interview with Science|Business, outlining his work plan for 2007. “Are we ready to have a United States of Research with a base in Europe? Are we in a changing world that’s multipolar, and Europe can strengthen its capacity by coordinating? These are the questions which are at the core of the debate,” he said.

The ideas are part of an effort to revive the notion of a European Research Area – an on-again, off-again policy, dating to 2000, to create a single European market for scientists and their work. And it follows approval last November of the largest-ever budget for EU research, a seven-year, €54 billion programme that makes the Commission one of the largest sources of non-military research funding in the world. With that budget settled by the European Parliament, Potočnik said, it’s now time to broaden the debate about the proper role of the EU in research – in effect, to see whether the member-states want to take the idea of EU collaboration a step further.

He’s getting some support already from the German government, now holding the rotating six-month presidency of the EU. On 30 January, Annette Schavan, German minister for education and research, told a European Parliament committee that pushing for more science infrastructure projects, international collaboration and other ERA-related measures are among several steps needed to “further enhance conditions for research and innovation in Europe.”

Her comments reflect a rising political awareness of the importance of research and innovation to the European economy – an awareness heightened last year by new forecasts that, in the next decade, China may overtake the EU in R&D investment. That follows more than a decade of gradual erosion of Europe’s ranking in global technology indicators, including patenting, balance of technological payments, science citations, and R&D budgets.

But it’s an open question whether, in fact, the EU members will actually put money behind more action – particularly after just approving the massive 40 per cent jump in R&D funding for the just-started seven-year plan. For instance, while preparing the new budget, an EU advisory committee came up with a list of 35 big-science projects, such new synchrotron facilities, that would have cost more than €30 billion. In the end, after already approving the big funding rise in more conventional EU programmes, the member-states closed their cheque books and allocated only €1.7 billion to start small feasibility studies for the new infrastructure projects. The bulk of the €54 billion approved under Framework Programme 7 and the Euratom nuclear research programme is for the more-established EU programmes in biotechnology, energy, information technology, transport and scientific exchange.

And the issue isn’t just money: many national governments are leery of giving Brussels too much freedom to launch R&D efforts that might drain money or status from their own programmes. Under the new budget, EU R&D spending amounts to roughly 5 per cent of all government R&D spending across Europe.

But Potočnik, a Slovenian economist who negotiated his country’s 2004 entry into the EU, said the new R&D debate he is launching will feed into several other key decisions that Europe will be making over the next few years. One is an effort, led by the Germans, to revive plans for an EU constitutional treaty, and the other is a planned renegotiation over the next few years of the EU’s basic funding and budgetary system.

Altogether – the issues of R&D, the constitution and the budget – are a “debate about which type of Europe do we want,” he said. For instance, he said, if an approved constitutional treaty included specific language on the importance of research and innovation to the community, the commission would have much greater authority to coordinate EU-wide R&D.

Among the issues to be examined, he said, is whether the commission should start co-financing more R&D projects with the member-states, under Article 169 of the governing Treaty on European Union. The idea would be to pick more areas in which various member-states want to spend money, and then the commission would chip in 50 per cent and coordinate the effort. It already does that, for instance, in coordinating European clinical drug trials in Africa. Similarly, he said, the commission could co-finance some of the list of big-science infrastructure projects that were considered earlier. “We need in Europe to be up to date with the major (science) facilities,” he said.

The core, Framework Programme 7, he said, is only one part of the overall effort that’s needed to make Europe more competitive in science and technology. Other issues include university reform, scientific labour-market policy, financial market regulation and other factors that affect the climate for R&D and innovation in Europe. “There has to be a coherence between the macroeconomic and the microeconomic structures” in R&D policy, he said. “Everything matters” – and the R&D policy debate needs to be broadened accordingly. “The idea is to picture a European Research Area in 2020 and try to find where we are at this very moment,” he said.

He said the opening green paper will be released at the end of March, and be discussed at a planned meeting in April of the national members of the European Competitiveness Council. The debate on specifics would proceed in the scientific community through 2007. “Concrete proposals,” he said, would appear in the first half of 2008. That also happens to be when his own country, Slovenia, holds the EU presidency.