In times of shrinking public spending, the 8th Framework Programme offers more money for R&D. With this show of faith comes an explicit new mandate for universities: Be engines of growth
And so …. finally, the European Union’s 8th Framework R&D programme, Horizon 2020 is agreed and ready to start disbursing €80 billion in grants in January 2014.
In parallel, ministers also approved €14.7 million for education under the Erasmus+ programme.
This means that between 2014 – 2020 education and R&D will both see significant increases at a time of constrained budgets – two of only a handful of EU programmes to get a real-terms boost.
The two programmes also come with completely remodelled structures, with Erasmus+ unifying funding for education, training and youth that previously sprawled across seven different budgets. Horizon 2020 too, has been recast, and for the first time brings all EU funding for research and its commercialisation into a single portfolio.
At the same time, there has been an in-depth edit of the R&D grants rule book, to cut red tape and reduce the bureaucratic overheads that are a particular deterrent to small companies. Tales of start-ups in effect subsidising EU research, and in some cases going bankrupt, because it takes so long to receive grant money – or not getting reimbursed at all because a full stop was in the wrong place - are not apocryphal. This has, and does happen currently.
Translate research to market
There has been a huge effort in the back rooms of the Commission to achieve this simplification. The proof will be in the pudding of course, but the explicit aim of simplification has been to make it easier for technology-based SMEs striving to translate research to market, to participate in Horizon 2020, and have the opportunity to collaborate with peers, larger brethren and academics.
Horizon 2020 is claimed by the European Commission to be a totally new type of research programme “designed to deliver results that make a difference to people’s lives.”
Welcoming the approval of Horizon 2020, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science said every cent of the €80 billion budget should be used to build a stronger, more innovative Europe. This speaks to the conviction lying at the heart of the rationale for increasing the research budget at this time – which is that R&D can be made to equal economic growth.
What’s needed to achieve this growth is to accelerate new discoveries coming out of Europe’s universities all the way through to commercialisation. To deliver on the aims of Horizon 2020, universities will need to work locally, nationally and internationally, to open up dialogue and collaborate with industry, to bring their research through to outcomes.
It will no longer be enough to provide the feedstock for innovation: universities must become the places where innovation happens, and where the current gap between the outputs of publically-funded research and something deemed suitably advanced for commercialisation is bridged.
Universities have been coming under pressure for some time to look beyond their roles in teaching and research, and make a contribution to innovation, job creation and economic growth. Now, with the approval of Horizon 2020, economic development becomes their explicit third mission.
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