Viewpoint: University alliances should be engines of distributed excellence

EU research Commissioner Ekaterina Zaharieva is right to expect European Universities alliances to make better use of Horizon Europe. Her message to MEPs earlier this month was not a warning about the future of EU funding for the alliances, but an invitation to use existing opportunities more strategically. 

After several years of building trust, mobility channels, joint educational formats and shared governance, European Universities alliances should be able to support stronger research collaboration as well. They have already developed relationships that many research consortia have to build from scratch. The question is whether they can now use this institutional capital to generate excellent Horizon Europe proposals more systematically. 

The answer is not to create a protected funding lane for alliances, as Horizon Europe must remain based on open competition and scientific excellence. Instead, European Universities alliances and other research networks can become strategic infrastructures that help excellent consortia emerge faster, more intelligently and across a wider geography.

This distinction matters for the future of Horizon Europe. Europe’s current debate too often presents competitiveness and cohesion as opposing objectives. In research policy, this is a false dichotomy. Competitiveness without cohesion risks overconcentration. Cohesion without excellence risks fragmentation. Europe needs mechanisms that allow them to reinforce one another. 

Scientific excellence is, by definition, concentrated. This is not a flaw of the research system but a structural feature of world-class science. Excellence requires long-term accumulation: talent, infrastructure, administrative capacity, doctoral training, international networks, research leadership and institutional memory. No serious European research policy can ignore this. Spreading resources too thinly in the name of balance would weaken Europe’s global position.

But concentration of excellence does not have to mean concentration in only a few metropolitan centres or historically dominant systems. Europe becomes stronger when the conditions for excellence are created across many regions, including regions that have high potential but weaker inherited capacity. This is the principle of distributed excellence.

Distributed excellence is not the same as territorial redistribution. It is not an argument for lowering standards or allocating research funding by geography. It is an argument for designing funding and collaboration mechanisms that allow excellence to emerge in more places, while preserving quality.

This is where European Universities alliances and networks can play a more strategic role. Their value is not that they should automatically receive Horizon Europe funding because they exist. Their value is that they can reduce some of the transaction costs that prevent strong but less centrally located institutions from entering excellent consortia early enough, confidently enough and with the right partners.

In practice, alliances and networks can help map complementary research strengths before calls are published. They can identify emerging teams across member institutions and connect them with established leaders. They can build pre-consortia around strategic themes, support grant intelligence, share proposal-writing expertise and create mentoring systems for European Research Council, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and collaborative cluster applications. They can connect research offices, doctoral schools, innovation units and academic leaders in ways that make collaboration more than an ad hoc reaction to a call.

This is especially important because high-quality Horizon Europe proposals rarely appear at the moment a call is announced. They are usually the result of prior trust, prior conversations, prior mobility, prior knowledge of institutional capacities and prior experience of working together. Alliances and networks already possess some of these preconditions. The challenge is to use them deliberately.

Uneven geography

One of Europe’s strategic weaknesses is the uneven geography of research capacity. Many excellent researchers and promising institutions are located outside the most dominant metropolitan centres. They are often highly dynamic, internationally oriented and ambitious, but they lack the accumulated advantages of older systems: large administrative support structures, dense local innovation ecosystems, long-standing grant cultures and automatic visibility in European consortia.

For such institutions, alliances and networks can be transformative, but only if they move beyond the logic of branding and mobility. A European Universities alliance should not simply be a European label attached to existing activities. It should be a working architecture for building capacity: a place where partners learn how to prepare better proposals, share infrastructure, form research teams, support early-career researchers and connect regional strengths to European priorities.

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The next Horizon Europe should not choose between a narrow model of competitiveness and a weak model of cohesion. It should support mechanisms that increase Europe’s total capacity for excellence. European Universities alliances and networks can contribute to this if they help build stronger research ecosystems across a wider institutional landscape. 

This requires clarity about what alliances should and should not do. They should not expect Horizon Europe to fund them simply because they are alliances. They should not replace scientific competition with institutional entitlement. They should not become closed clubs that reproduce existing hierarchies under a European label.

But they should become platforms for earlier, deeper and more strategic collaboration. They should help partners identify where genuine complementarity exists. They should support less experienced institutions in entering competitive consortia without diluting quality. They should connect education and research in ways that strengthen talent formation. They should make it easier for Europe to build excellent teams across a wider geography.

Europe does not have to choose between competitiveness and cohesion. It needs to design instruments through which they can reinforce each another. Horizon Europe should remain excellence-based. But excellence itself should not be imagined as something that can only be produced in a few established hubs.

Distributed excellence is the principle that makes this possible. European Universities alliances and networks could become one of its most important instruments.

Adam Kola is vice-rector for research at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland, and vice-president of the Young European Research Universities Network.