Parliament ‘misreads’ link between Horizon Europe and ECF, Commission official says

The European Parliament is “misreading” plans to connect the next iteration of Horizon Europe and the new European Competitiveness Fund (ECF), according to Maive Rute, deputy director-general of the European Commission’s department for internal market, industry, entrepreneurship and SMEs.

“The Parliament proposal is coming with very noble aims, but maybe there is a bit of a misreading of what we [. . .] have proposed,” she said during a webinar organised by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology on March 30. “My reading of it is that there is a strong push to do exactly what we aim to do under the ECF: to have more targeted and industry-driven, challenge-driven delivery,” she added.

One of the more controversial aspects of the Commission’s proposal is a link between the future ECF, which will be jointly managed by the Commission directorates for research and for industrial policy, and Pillar 2 of Horizon Europe, dedicated to collaborative research, with a single work programme for each thematic area to include Horizon Europe and ECF calls.

MEPs have countered with proposals to create a more bottom-up Horizon Europe against what they see as attempts by the Commission to gain more control over the design of research funding calls and to subordinate parts of the Framework Programme to industrial objectives. Rapporteurs in the Parliament’s industry and research committee proposed a clearer separation between the two instruments, with collaborative research calls managed by separate programme committees under Horizon Europe.

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Rute said that the ECF will not be “all just top-down.” However, the Commission is set to provide more clarity on how the ECF and Horizon Europe will work together in an upcoming document called the “competitiveness coordination tool.”

This document has been delayed several times already, but Rute did not give an indication as to when it will be ready. 

“The competitiveness coordination tool is going to be an exercise where, for a limited number of strategically important areas, we would apply an extra coordination capacity,” she said. “It is going to be a light exercise of a rather targeted nature.”

While Rute recognised the need to maintain scientific excellence at the core of Horizon Europe, she expects the ECF to complement it “with further requests on impact, quality and delivery on the market, so that one can have this combination of scientifically sound projects, and yet also projects that will deliver on the real economy.”