EU to announce ‘social readiness’ pilot under 2025 Horizon Europe plan

A flurry of climate, energy and mobility projects in the 2025 work programme for Cluster 5 in Horizon Europe are to be subject to a “societal readiness pilot”, to test their likely acceptability to society at large, according to a draft document obtained by Science|Business.

The Commission says the pilot will test criteria for ensuring researchers and innovators take into consideration “different societal needs and concerns when developing innovations and respond to them, thereby increasing the potential for societal uptake”.

These considerations should be integrated “transversally” across the work packages that are submitted by applicants setting out in detail the tasks, deliverables and milestones of a project.

The Commission says the outcomes of the societal readiness pilot will be closely assessed and analysed before possible wider future use.

The broader goal of the pilot is to boost interdisciplinarity and further integrate social sciences in EU-funded innovation projects, by encouraging  project partners in science, technology, engineering and mathematics to work more closely with partners in the social sciences and humanities.

The proposal for the pilots is set out in a draft work programme dated in April 2024. It will be subject to updates up until a final version is released in the first quarter of 2025. The draft does not include budgets and deadlines for the calls.

The April version says proposals for topics that include a request to follow the Societal Readiness approach should meet a set of requirements listed below:

• Resources should be meaningfully distributed to cover project activities associated with advancing Societal Readiness;
• Partners involved should bring sufficient expertise to support Societal Readiness activities via the inclusion of social sciences and humanities disciplines;
• Partners from all types and disciplines in the consortium, according to the relevance of their involvement, should be included in Societal Readiness activities;
• Proposals should clearly address how the project will integrate Societal Readiness throughout the proposed work;
• A public deliverable report called first report on Societal Readiness should be elaborated within the first six months of the project;
• A public deliverable report called final report on Societal Readiness should be elaborated within the last three months of the project.

The work programmes and transparency

The work programmes lay out plans for the topics and priorities according to which the European Commission will spend Horizon Europe research money. The documents are drafted by Commission officials, but member states also have a say on the content.

Draft versions are circulating in advance of their official publication, but not to all relevant stakeholders, with a few privileged institutions having early access to the plans.

Science|Business is making the full history of the drafting process publicly available in our Horizon Papers database.

We think it is important to maintain a public record of how the programme evolves in successive rounds of drafting between the Commission and member states. It is a political process – which, so far, the Commission refuses to make transparent. You can share anonymously other draft work programmes at [email protected].