EU-industry partnerships launch with new research calls worth €1B

The seven Joint Technology Initiatives (JTIs) made their Horizon 2020 debut with the launch of a first round of calls, worth €1.13 billion.

In total the JTIs, which are large-scale public-private partnerships in a number of strategic technologies and sectors, will receive total funding of €19 billion over the next seven years, with an EU contribution of around €9 billion to be matched by funding and in kind resources from industry and €1 billion from member states.

“I urge businesses and researchers to respond to these calls with excellent quality proposals – we need everyone working together if we are to be effective in meeting challenges such as lower carbon emissions, alternatives to fossil fuels and the next generation of antibiotics,” said Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, European Commissioner for Research. 

Six of the JTIs will manage research in the areas of innovative medicines, aeronautics, bio-based industries, fuel cells and hydrogen, electronics and rail transport.

The seventh, SESAR, which is responsible for providing technology to underpin the modernisation of Europe’s air traffic management systems, will receive funding until its membership under Horizon 2020 expires in 2016.

The new calls for projects include getting 100 hydrogen-powered vehicles onto Europe’s roads, developing treatments for age-related eye diseases, improving understanding of Type-1 diabetes and designing more efficient planes. Companies, SMEs, universities and research organisations are eligible to participate.

Kick-starting technologies

The idea behind the JTIs is that joint public and private funding can help to kick-start technologies in fields where it is too risky or uneconomical for companies to invest in the initial research. A number of these initiatives existed under Framework Programme 7 (FP7), and are returning with larger budgets in Horizon 2020.

Collaborations over the last seven years have already claimed success in innovations such as low-power microprocessors for use in wearable devices, a better way to test drugs for Alzheimer’s disease, and improvements to open rotor jet engines.

PPPs	Horizon 2020 & participating member states (for ECSEL only)	Industry contribution	Total
Innovative medicines initiative	€1.6M	€1.6M	€3.3M
Fuel cells and hydrogen 2	€.7M	€.7M	€1.3M
Clean sky 2	€1.8M	€2.1M	€4.0M
Bio-based industries	€.9M	€2.8M	€3.8M
Electronic components and systems (ECSEL)	€1.2M (and at least €1.2M from participating member states)	€1.7M	€4.0M
Shift2Rail	€.5M	€.5M	€1.0M
Total	€7.9M (€6.7M from H2020 & €1.2M from member states)	€9.4M	€17.2M

Joint undertaking	Horizon 2020	Eurocontrol	Total
SESAR	€.6M	€1.0M	€1.6M

IMI, Fuel Cells and Clean Sky carry on from FP7, while ECSEL is a merger of two previous partnerships, ENIAC, which specialised in nanoelectronics, and ARTEMIS, which carried out research in embedded computing.

The Commission will put in up to 50 per cent in cash for each initiative, while the contribution of industrial partners can consist of both in-kind contributions and hard cash. In the case of ECSEL, the member states are also putting in money.

New (and returning) kids on the block

The Bio-based industries JTI is a new entity, which aims among other objectives to develop technology for turning the cellulose in agricultural and forest waste into biofuels. The consortium hopes to start building bio-refineries in 2015.

Dirk Carrez, Coordinator, credits the way Europe’s bio-based organisations have caught up. “Some years ago, Europe was creating knowledge, but a lot of the deployment was happening in the US and Asia. In response, the Commission brought us around the table. We had no legal entity at that time. We had to organise ourselves.”
Peder Holk Nielsen, CEO of Novozymes, said, “There’s now about 70 companies in Europe working in the field; many of them are in a leading position globally today.”

The railway industry by comparison is well-established. Shift2rail aims to promote the modernisation and support the creation of a single European railway system. “It’s important that the rail services become more time efficient, attractive and more convenient,” said Jochen Eickholt, CEO of Siemens’ Rail Systems Division. “With China having very concise rail strategies in place, it’s mandatory that we make progress too.”

Fuel Cells returns with an increased budget, which Henri Winand of CEO Intelligent Energy said is a “huge endorsement”. More than 150 projects have been funded to date and hydrogen fuel cell-powered buses are in use in five cities in Europe. “Quietly, it’s all achieving scale,” added Winand. 

For the Clean Sky consortium, which is developing quieter, cleaner engines for planes, the next six years will make or break the project, said Jean-Paul Herteman, CEO, SAFRAN Group. “We’ll have to fly test technologies and go through with expensive demonstrations, but our targets are in good shape,” he said.

Political steps 

“I could not imagine seven years ago, when launching the JTIs, that I’d be back in a new/old situation,” said Jerzy Buzek, newly-elected chair of the European Parliament Industry, Research and Energy committee. Buzek was the MEP who steered the FP7 package through the EU Parliament at the time.

There was a political struggle in forming the JTIs to begin with, he recalled. Researchers were sceptical about industry-led projects. “They hated me for suggesting the JTIs, maybe they still do,” he joked.

Unfamiliarity with the formation and running of public-private partnerships presented a steep learning curve for many participants in the first phase of JTIs from 2007-2013. Dealing with administration, agreeing terms for intellectual property and setting out a coherent strategy with so many people sitting around the same table, were among the main bugbears.

Making the JTIs work better was the main focus of negotiations this time around. Among the main changes to the way they operate is an enhanced role for each consortium’s scientific committee, better feedback on progress to member states, help for smaller partners in navigating intellectual property agreements, a requirement for projects to publish more information and a beefed-up interim assessment of performance.

More info

Bio-based Industries
Clean Sky 2
Fuel Cells and Hydrogen 2
Electronic Components and Systems (ECSEL)
Innovative Medicines Initiative 2
SESAR
Shift2Rail