Horizon work programmes for 2025 show clear shift to competitiveness

Starting this year, Horizon Europe will double down on the EU’s competitiveness agenda and pivot towards simpler administration rules, according to draft work programmes pre-published this week by the European Commission.

The shift in priority is apparent from the first sentence: “Europe’s competitiveness – and its global leadership in becoming a clean and digital economy – depends on a new age of invention and ingenuity.”

This is just the first step in a push for simpler, more competitiveness-focused programming in 2026 and 2027, the last two years of Horizon Europe, the draft documents suggest.

It can also be read as a preview of the direction research and innovation funding may take under the next multiannual EU budget, which will be set out by the Commission this summer. As things stand, the next EU research programme will likely be folded into a broader EU mega-fund for competitiveness.

As for 2025, the pairing of green and digital transformations continues to be the key goal, but with a strong competitiveness flavour. This time, the Clean Industrial Deal, the bloc’s new plan for securing global competitiveness through net-zero innovation, will be a key policy driver.

The new work programme also introduces a new quality seal for projects that get high scores but fail to secure funding due to limited budgets. The Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP) Seal will be awarded to projects that meet any of the STEP objectives, which cover digital, clean and biotechnologies. Much like the Horizon Seal of Excellence, the hope is that the Commission's mark of approval will help projects get funding elsewhere.

Meanwhile, there is a dedicated work programme for the New European Bauhaus, the Commission’s policy for green, innovative and aesthetic urban renewal. This addition to Horizon Europe has been a long time coming. 

The plans foresee the creation of eight new public-private partnerships in 2025 to federate member state research efforts and encourage industry participation. These cover topics such as raw materials, innovative materials, solar photovoltaics, forests and brain health.

Simpler is better 

The Commission is also hoping to simplify how money is allocated under Horizon Europe, with the changes introduced for 2025 a likely foretaste of bigger changes in the years to come. 

First and foremost, this year’s work programmes are shorter and less prescriptive than before. This gives applicants more freedom to define their expected pathways and leaves fewer administrative boxes to tick. 

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Second, there are fewer calls expecting to fund just one winning project. This way, grantees are not competing over a single grant and each project does not have to cover every single aspect of a topic. 

Third, there are more two-stage calls in which applicants first submit a short summary proposal before being asked to submit a full proposal. This saves time for those that do not make it past the first stage. This year, there will 29 two-stage topics.

Fourth, more lump-sum funding, lifting the requirements for beneficiaries to report how they spent each euro of their grant. Not everyone sees lump sums as a simplification, but this year more than 35% of the budget will be spent this way. And the percentage will keep climbing in the coming years, with the Commission aiming for at least 50% of calls to be lump-sum by 2027.

Fourth, the Commission has revised the rules for a few of the extra requirements for projects, such as the “do no significant harm” principle and the check on the robustness of AI tools. 

The Commission had also wanted to simplify the requirements for gender action plans, which each Horizon Europe institutional beneficiary must hold. But the member states pushed back, leaving the changes to be agreed for the next work programme in 2026.

Finally, a pilot of blind evaluations will continue. In the last few years, the Commission has been toying with the idea of asking applicants to not disclose their identities in the first stage of two-stage evaluations to help avoid bias. 

When evaluators see an application from a Horizon leader such as KU Leuven, for example, they may be biased to rate it as excellent simply due to the institution’s reputation. This trial, the results of which have yet to be released, will continue. 

What’s next? 

For the next few weeks, these work programmes remain draft. They will be finalised, with any last changes, in May. 

In the meantime, Science|Business continues to publish leaked draft Horizon Europe work programmes for 2026 and 2027. We think it 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 find them on our Horizon papers page.