Widening newsletter 11

Latest news

HORIZON FIGURES: Polish scientists are receiving significantly more grant funding from Horizon Europe than in the previous EU research programme, Horizon 2020. According to European Commission data, research institutions in Poland signed an unprecedented 472 Horizon Europe grant agreements in 2022. More details are available here.

THE ECOSYSTEM: Womenture, a new EU initiative to support women entrepreneurs across Europe has its base in central and eastern Europe, a region where female founders face tough challenges, plus the occasional advantage over those in the west. Ian Mundell has the story.

ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN HUNGARY: A fact-finding trip to Budapest has left MEPs from across the political spectrum uneasy. Their impressions of deteriorating academic freedom and self-censorship are at odds with how government representatives portrayed things. Here’s the full story.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE: The row between Brussels and Budapest over Horizon Europe funding continues and is now producing effects beyond the universities flagged by the EU. A Budapest university that is not affected by the EU block on funds has received emails from worried grant partners after an unclear message was posted on the EU’s funding portal as a result of poor communication from the European Commission. Read the full story here.

NO MORE EXCUSES: The 2023 Regional Competitiveness Index placed Romania last, but those working to boost innovation in its regions believe the future could now be in their own hands. The whole country, with the exception of the region around the capital, Bucharest, is coloured a dark shade of pink on one of the maps in the index, indicating a low level of innovation. This is in stark contrast with northern Europe, around the Netherlands and Scandinavia, where every single region is high in the ranking. Thomas Brent has the story.

In other news

ERC WIDENING GROUP: The European Research Council (ERC) has launched a new communication campaign that will run through to the end of this year that is meant to attract more researchers from Widening countries to apply for ERC grants. The ERC has published a first round of articles that look into the east-west performance gap in its funding competitions. The list includes a Q&A with Alice Valkárová, the chair of the ERC’s Widening working group, and an opinion piece by Jacek Kuźnicki, former president of the scientific council of the Polish National Science Centre, who argues EU research funding programmes should allocate 10% of their budgets to researchers from countries with poor science systems.

BULGARIA: INSAIT, the country’s newly founded institute for computer science, artificial intelligence and technology has announced the first cohort of its summer research fellowship. The eight successful candidates have been selected from a pool of nearly 700 applicants from 47 countries. INSAIT was launched last year with the help of Swiss R&D powerhouses EPFL and ETH Zurich.

THE SWISS CONNECTION: Bulgarian minister for education and science Atanas Pekanov  paid a visit to Bern last week to strengthen Bulgarian-Swiss links in research and innovation. Since 2013, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) has supported some 70 research projects in which Bulgarian researchers have been involved.

NEW RECTOR: The University of Tartu has elected neurosurgery professor Toomas Asser as rector. Among other priorities, Asser wants to improve the university’s cooperation with industry and start-ups and to secure a better funding balance between basic and applied sciences.

SPEAKING OF THE BALTICS: Palantir, the US company specialising in big data analytics is to establish a regional hub for data analysis in Vilnius, thanks to a partnership with Lithuania’s ministry of defence. The partnership is meant to boost the development of defence technologies for the Baltic region. “Developing new high technology oriented foreign investment opportunities as well as creating partnerships to co-create new technological products important for regional security is a win-win policy,” said Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda.

COST DEADLINE: The 2023 call for new proposals for COST Actions is open until 25 October. The Actions are interdisciplinary research networks that bring researchers and innovators together to investigate a topic for four years. The programme is also a good launching pad for researchers in central and eastern Europe who wish to be successful in Horizon Europe grant competitions. More details on how to apply are available here.

Mark your calendars 

ONLINE, 10 MAY: The Lithuanian research, development and innovation liaison office in Brussels is organising a webinar on regional innovation valleys, a new initiative by the European commission to spur deep tech innovations across Europe. More details here.

WARSAW, 16 MAY: Science|Business is organising a hybrid roundtable in May to bring together research stakeholders on building attractive centres of excellence in the Widening countries. More details here.

Also in Warsaw, that same week, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Polish Academy of Sciences are launching the European Climate Conference (ECC).

BRUSSELS, 25 MAY: Slovakia’s national security authority is organising a conference on cybersecurity research and innovation. The event will be organised in cooperation with the Slovak, Czech, Polish and Hungarian R&D liaison offices in Brussels. More details here.

The Widening newsletter is a roundup of news and analysis of research and innovation policy and investments in central and eastern Europe, delivered to your inbox twice a month. Sign up here.