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If money is to be taken from the Horizon 2020 pot, there should be oversight from science to ensure research and innovation is not weakened, says an open letter from Europe’s leading scientific groups

The budget of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research should be absorbed by the European Research Council. A proviso that projects backed by Dutch money be conducted in the Netherlands would strengthen the country’s research, says Luc Soete, Rector Magnificus, Maastricht University

The SME Initiative aims to encourage banks to lend more to cash-starved small companies. The European Commission wants more countries to use this route for channelling regional development money to the grass roots

The US patent office has given specific examples of what types of software can get protection. This provides long-awaited clarification, says patent expert Andrew Thompson

German companies still top the table but overall Europe is less innovative, a new EU survey reveals

A group of German researchers give limited intelligence to a well-known computer figure

How can Europe balance its goal of energy security with the need to reduce CO2 emissions? Part of the answer would be fixing the carbon emissions trading system

Officials gathered in Brussels this week to untangle some of the messy, competing goals for making European energy greener, cheaper and more modern. Cutting energy use is the leading priority, a Commission adviser told the meeting

The search engine giant will dramatically increase its investment in European start-ups and skills in 2015. Prospects are good, but there must be broader acceptance in Europe that some ventures will fail, says David Drummond, chair of Google Ventures

Accusations fly as the European Commission releases details of the money its €315B investment plan will take out of the EU’s Horizon 2020 kitty. The European Institute of Innovation and Technology faces the deepest cut

With the post of EU chief science adviser axed, Research Commissioner Carlos Moedas is to look at new ways of providing independent scientific inputs to policymaking. A list of the options will be presented before the summer, he tells Science|Business

While other social media networks for researchers are about showing off publications or keeping tabs on impact metrics, Piirus makes introductions. This is the way to find your perfect partner – for research, says Piirus founder Fiona Colligan

CERN is getting ready to switch on its massive underground collider again. The Higgs boson, the standout discovery of the last few years, is in the bag, so what are physicists looking for now?

Breakthroughs in renewable energy don’t come from Eureka moments in the laboratory, but from long term effort and investment to push nascent technologies to the point of cost efficiency, says Carlos Härtel, GE’s head of R&D in Europe

A total of 277 SMEs will get funding to help get promising commercial ideas up and running. Companies from Spain, Italy, the UK, the Netherlands and France did well, but the success rate is low overall