EU should spur ‘horizontal’ research collaborations, former Dutch minister says

The EU could benefit from setting up “sectoral plans,” funding schemes that would enable research institutions to establish long-term collaborations in specific science sectors, Robbert Dijkgraaf, president-elect of the International Science Council, told delegates at a Science|Business event on June 16.

These sectoral plans are a collaborative research instrument established by Dijkgraaf during his mandate as minister for education, culture and science in the Netherlands, from 2022 to 2024. 

The idea is to encourage groups of universities to jointly propose a collaborative a research programme in one of four academic domains: sciences; engineering and technology; social sciences and humanities; and medical and health sciences.

In 2023, the Dutch government started investing €200 million a year in programmes submitted through the scheme. Specific areas of interest have been proposed within each of the four domains, such as engineering and sustainability, data-driven innovation in healthcare and, within the humanities and social sciences domain, wellbeing and prosperity.

Rather than supporting specific research projects, this money is intended to help the participating institutions build capacity and hire people, strengthening departments active in each field.

“I would love to see something like this in Europe,” Dijkgraaf said. “Too often, I’m at wonderful universities or companies that have an excellent group in a certain area, but they simply cannot generate in their country, in their institution, the skills that are necessary to compete at the global level. So, we have to somehow link those individual strengths.”

Dijkgraaf said that Europe would benefit from setting up horizontal structures enabling universities and research organisations to cooperate on long-term goals. “I think of the research system as some kind of a matrix, where the vertical lines are the institutions, and the horizontal lines are the way in which they collaborate, in particular, on strategic topics.”

More broadly, the former minister warned of the persisting fragmentation of national research and innovation policies. He said that Europe should find ways to strengthen links rather the individual organisations. “My dream would be to have a Europe where I have some kind of an atlas of research maps, and I look at the map, say for quantum or biotech, and I see certain areas lighting up,” he added. 

However, the implementation of sectoral plans at the EU level would require a coalition of institutions that would be willing to engage, Dijkgraaf said. “It’s not only top research groups that you need. You need vocational schools, you need small and medium enterprises. You have to make an effort to make sure that everybody can play a part in this.”

According to Gerard Barkema, a professor of computer science at Utrecht University, who was involved in setting up a sectoral plan in his field, the initiative was largely bottom-up as it allowed research sectors to organise and prove to the government that they were worth being funded. “If a specific sector is able to produce a portrait which is convincing and which also comes with good plans of how to strengthen the sector, then the discussion is started about whether it should be funded or not,” he told Science|Business. 

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Barkema said that the first sectoral plans were set for physics and chemistry and each received €10 million per year. Later on, the scheme expanded to include mathematics and computer science. “It was so successful that other disciplines started to complain that they also wanted to be part of a sectoral plan,” he said. 

But the long-term impact of these plans is still unclear. The sectoral plans that received funding in 2023 are expected to be evaluated by a monitoring committee this year. Then, the plans will be evaluated again in 2029, after which the committees will advise the ministry of science on their long-term viability.

EU-wide expansion

The Dutch sectoral plans inspired René Repasi, the European Parliament’s lead rapporteur for the specific programme implementing Horizon Europe, to introduce an amendment calling for a similar initiative to be funded through the European Research Council (ERC) for a period of six years.

However, embedding them in the ERC is probably not a great idea, said Robert-Jan Smits, president emeritus at the Eindhoven University of Technology.

“Leave the ERC in peace,” he told Science|Business. “If you really want to help the ERC, better call for a strengthening of its autonomy, with the European Commission as its guarantor, and keep it far away from any political interference by Council and Parliament.”

Smits also noted that the ERC is likely to get its budget doubled under the next multiannual EU budget and will have more than enough on its plate. “[The ERC] will certainly not have the time to deal with other matters.”