Framework planning tops agenda for EU R&D advisory panel

Planning for the next version of the European Union’s main research programme, Framework, heads the agenda of work for a research advisory board to the European Commission, according to its chair.

John Wood, who was in December re-elected chair of the European Research Area Board, said the 22-member body will be developing proposals for the next cycle of EU research funding, under the Framework Programme. He said the EU Director-General for Research, Robert-Jan Smits, “has given us the task of reflecting on what FP8 should look like based on our previous recommendations.  We have now set up a series of working groups to do this and the outputs from these plus some of our previously unpublished recommendations will be a key input into the FP8 programme.”

The Board, which meets regularly to advise Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, EU Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, has previously recommended sweeping changes in the way the EU funds and manages its research. Framework is the second-largest civilian research programme in the world (after the US National Institutes of Health), authorised to spend €50.5 billion in its current, seven-year budget cycle ending in 2013. The Commission plans by June this year to put forward specific proposals for the next cycle, and the Commissioner outlined some broad themes she wants to pursue last October.

ERAB last year published a set of recommendations that included radically simplifying the Framework bureaucracy, creating a single European patent and open innovation charter, and creating a fast-track procedure for public procurement agencies to buy innovative products and services.

The board, which consists of 22 leaders in European universities, technology companies and research institutes, is also naming two new members: Anne Glover, CEO of Cambridge venture capital firm Amadeus Capital Partners, and Luc Soete, a professor at the University of Maastricht and Director of the United Nations University’s technology-policy think tank, UNU-MERIT. They succeed two members who are stepping down, Karol Musiol, rector of Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and Frank Gannon, former Director General of Science Foundation Ireland.

Wood is secretary-general of the Association of Commonwealth Universities. He was formerly CEO of the UK’s Council of the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, Principal of Engineering at Imperial College London, and Chair of another influential EU advisory body, the European Strategic Forum on Research Infrastructures.