European Innovation Council should not tap Horizon 2020, say universities

The new European Innovation Council (EIC) should not be funded from the Horizon 2020 budget or advise lawmakers on innovation policy, say over 50 universities in a statement published yesterday. 

“The high oversubscription and generally very low application success rates in Horizon 2020… are of great concern to our universities. Therefore, the EIC should not be funded from the existing Horizon 2020 budget,” the statement says. 

In addition, the EIC should neither address the increase of availability of risk capital nor the simplification and harmonisation of business regulations.

“We caution against attributing a policy advisory role to the EIC, as there are already many such bodies and initiatives at European level,” the statement says.

EU Research Commissioner Carlos Moedas has indicated the new EIC could have an advisory function, suggesting it could import the ‘green deals’ scheme from the Netherlands, which gets businesses and regulators around a table to discuss what rules are holding up emerging technologies.

Last week Maria da Graca Carvalho, a former Portuguese MEP and now adviser in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, told a Science|Business event that an advisory panel is “a very important [feature] for the EIC.”

However, researchers have pointed out that having an expert panel which awards funding and gives advice to lawmakers could lead to conflicts of interest. 

Moedas has said he envisages the EIC as a 'one stop shop' portal where people can find any innovation-related programme run through Brussels. The universities disagree with this view. 

The statement was made jointly by CESAER, EuroTech Universities Alliance, IDEA League, CLUSTER and Nordic Five Tech, which represent universities in 24 countries. 

It says that, in general, “using public funding for innovation both from the side of government and from the universities of science and technology can be difficult, if not market-distorting.”

Nevertheless, it recommends that the EIC should offer full grants for radical projects with high risk and less money for projects with lower risk, recommending the EIC also learns from the European Research Council (ERC) approach.

Like the scientific council in the ERC, the EIC should be governed by an independent council made up of people from academia, business, industry, public sector and venture capital from Europe and beyond. 

There is plenty to be hashed out on the EIC still, not least the budget, and the full picture probably will not be clear for several months. The Commission’s public consultation on the EIC closes tomorrow. 

The preliminary plan is to develop a pilot after Horizon 2020's midterm review next year.

Before that, Moedas wants a hard proposal in hand so as he can sell the EIC at the European research minister Competitiveness Council meeting in May.