Essential guide: what is a Horizon Europe partnership?

Here’s a Horizon riddle for you.

Q. What do you call a research project that goes on and on and on?

A. A partnership.

Well, to a close Horizon observer, it can look that way at times.

“Partnerships” are big, established consortia that organise research and innovation funding over several years on specific, high profile topics in Horizon.

There’s one to develop supercomputers, another for semiconductors, a third for global healthcare – at present, 50 of them in all, with another nine scheduled to appear over the next few years.

They have a huge number of partners or members – altogether, 4,553, according to a massive report the Commission published in April 2024. These partners can include other government agencies, multinationals, small companies, universities and public research organisations.

And they have big budgets. So far in Horizon Europe, they are expected to spend €24.9 billion or 39.8% of the entire seven-year budget for Pillar II. But under the authorising legislation, that will rise further over the next few years – perhaps adding an extra €5.4 billion.

These kinds of formal R&I partnerships began in 2002, as a way to steer the research money into some perennial hot topics – especially those tied to important industrial sectors such as IT or pharma. Some of them have industry executives on their boards, helping set the research goals (a fact that leads some critics in the European Parliament to call them too cosy with industry.)

They draft elaborate strategic agendas, on how they plan to spend their budgets in the years ahead. They organise calls for grant proposals like other parts of Horizon, and their procedures and grant contracts follow the standard Horizon rulebook; indeed, most of the paperwork is handled by the same Commission agencies that manage the rest of Horizon.

So researchers can respond to a partnership call much as they would to a conventional Pillar II call – with one important difference. Because they are so specialised, and have a well-established network of past grantees, the odds of actually winning a grant can be higher in some partnerships than in Horizon generally.

Another special feature of partnerships is the funding model. In essence, they make it easier to pool or coordinate resources from several funding sources: Horizon, other EU programmes, national agencies, multinational companies or charitable organisations. In all, an extra €38.6 billion in cash or in-kind resources has been pledged for these partnerships to amplify the Horizon money.

Multinationals are the most common source of in-kind support, through which they commit to devote some of their own lab staff or resources to work on a project. They do that if they think it’s strategically important to be part of a big EU-wide research project on a particular disease therapy or energy technology they want to develop. Adding all these funding types together – EU cash, other public money, industry in-kind and more – the Commission report estimates that 49 partnerships on average attract nearly three times more resources than Horizon Europe itself contributes (specifically, a leverage ratio of 2.83 additional resources, for each Horizon euro committed).

It says a common type of industry partnership (Joint Undertakings – see below) has the lowest leverage ratio, of 1.64, while the European Institute of Innovation and Technology has the highest, of 5.6.

And, as mentioned at the outset, partnerships tend to live on from one Framework Programme to the next – because they are targeted to economically or politically important sectors. In Horizon Europe only 10 of the planned 59 partnerships are entirely new topics. The others are in well plowed fields, reanimated from one Framework Programme to the next. Or, as the Commission report drily noted: “It has proven to be rather difficult to terminate, replace or reshape existing partnerships, leading to a mushrooming of (sometimes overlapping) initiatives.”

The partnerships come in three basic flavours, depending on their legal status.

Institutionalised partnerships: These are the largest and most lobbied partnerships, in which industry is most engaged. They include Joint Undertakings like the €2.4 billion Clean Aviation partnership involving much of the European aviation industry in efforts to develop low-emission, climate-friendly planes and engines. Other types of institutionalised partnerships include some long-term collaborations among public-sector partners, and the public-private Knowledge and Innovation Communities of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology.

Co-programmed partnerships: There are 12 partnerships between the Commission and mostly private, though sometimes public, partners; they operate under memoranda of understanding among the partners, rather than legally binding contracts like the institutionalised partnerships have. Eleven launched in June 2021 with a total budget of €22 billion of which €8 billion will be contributed by the Commission. All these partnerships fall in the digital and climate clusters of Horizon Europe, and cover areas such as AI, transport, and batteries. The twelfth partnership on space was launched in September 2024 after the Commission signed a memorandum of understanding involving some space industry associations, including the biggest, Eurospace.

Co-funded partnerships: These are co-funded with other organisations, often state governments. In these partnerships, managed as part of a Horizon Europe grant agreement, the different funding agencies agree to co-design a series of relevant funding calls. Horizon provides 30% to 50% of the total budget, with most of the rest from the other governments. There are 17 such partnerships on rare diseases, blue economy, animal health and other fields, mostly concentrated in the health and bioeconomy pillars of Horizon Europe.

Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt from the 2024 edition of Horizon Europe: The essential guide. If this guide is for you, so is the Science|Business Funding Newswire, a specialised news channel to help you find your way and stay up to date in the fast-moving world of research funding.