The R&D Express: When Brussels speaks, do capitals act?

After publishing nearly 70 editions of The Widening, Science|Business is renaming its fortnightly newsletter The R&D Express to reflect a change of focus: from covering policy debates around the EU research and innovation gap, to diving into the detail of reforms and investments that are being rolled out in central and eastern Europe.

As the political attention in Brussels is shifting towards the upcoming European Research Area (ERA) act, we want to know more about how countries in this region are actually contributing to the EU’s innovation agenda. The European Commission hopes the new ERA legislation will create a single market for research, help boost public and private R&D investment across the EU and nudge member states to modernise their research and innovation systems.

In this context, we believe that action on the ground matters more than Brussels debates around the Widening programme. Those funding schemes play an important role, but there is a much bigger story we can tell about the people, the ideas and the institutions uniting Europe’s research and innovation sector. 

When we launched The Widening newsletter in September 2022, we wanted to start a conversation with R&D leadership, public and private, in central and eastern Europe, as well as those in Brussels and other western capitals, who were eager to bridge the innovation gap between east and west.

This was not very long after negotiations for the current Horizon Europe programme were nearly derailed by disagreements over the Commission’s Widening funding schemes. At the time, governments haggled over the scope and budget of a set of funding opportunities aimed at helping researchers in poorer member states build the networks and the infrastructure they needed to become fully fledged members of EU’s research establishment. 

This newsletter will remain true to its origins, but we will increase our coverage of policies, strategies and investments coming out of countries in central and eastern Europe, be it EU members or soon-to-be members. We want to know more about the ideas driving their policy agendas and budgets, and how they contribute, alone or in partnership with others, to a stronger science and technology base in Europe.

Going forward, The R&D Express will move from country to country to cover in more detail how national reforms and investments, as well as cross-border initiatives, are helping the EU strengthen its science and technology sector.

Since January, our reporting has already reflected this change.

We looked at how the Czech Academy of Sciences launched a joint-stock company to better capitalise on the research results of its 54 institutes. We also wrote about how Croatia has launched a €30 million project, partly funded by the EU, to rescue key parts of the Brodarski Institute, a massive communist-era maritime research centre. 

Poland has launched a new €1 billion Innovate Poland programme, which aims to spur the growth of start-ups, scale-ups and technology companies by building up local private investment funds, and to simultaneously wean innovators off development funds.

Estonia is also looking to set up a new centre of excellence in nuclear physics that would bring together all of its projects involving CERN. While this is partly about enhancing Estonia’s research effort, it also aims to create and support more start-ups.

Officials in Kyiv and Brussels are coordinating on a plan to finance and manage the reconstruction of Ukraine’s science system, and to put research and innovation at the core of the country’s long-term development.

Last but not least, Albania is looking to bolster its research and innovation performance and aims to climb the rankings of the European Innovation Scoreboard.

Our plan is to continue to deliver more stories like these, starting on April 22. That’s when The R&D Express will land in your inboxes. If you are not a subscriber, please sign up here.   

And, if you have ideas and suggestions for what we should cover next, please send your pitch to [email protected]. 

Update: The first edition of the R&D Express is now available here.