The Widening News

Speaking at this year’s World Economic Forum, Nikolay Denkov hit out at Europe’s obsession with succeeding immediately when it comes to new technologies. It is important to experiment and fail, he says

Polish professor Dariusz Jemielniak is leading a project on vaccine scepticism. He says long term strategies and more resources are needed to counter the disinformation that is fuelling mistrust in science

Despite an increasingly strong showing in winning EU funds, special support measures remain necessary for the country’s long-term development, says Eugénio Campos Ferreira, vice rector for research and innovation at the University of Minho

The European Parliament has rejected a call to bring Hungarian universities back into the Erasmus student and academic mobility scheme, with a large majority of MEPs insisting prime minister Viktor Orbán must make the required reforms first

As 2024 begins, we assess the success of attempts to close the EU’s east-west research and innovation gap. There is progress, but a decade on, disparity persists and alongside beefed up EU measures, national R&D funding needs to increase

The four countries have teamed up to bring together Germany’s political heft with the expertise in digital transformation of the Baltic states and inject fresh impetus into the EU single digital market agenda

Merging institutions can bring economies of scale, strengthening finances and research - and attracting staff and students. But vested interests often block this route to moving up the league tables 

After concentrating support on companies that were forced to flee, EU initiatives are increasingly working to rebuild the country’s start-up ecosystem

Recent supply shocks have exposed Europe’s dependence on imports of essential resources. Estonia is aiming to overcome this by developing new techniques for extracting raw materials from overlooked or under-exploited domestic sources

A partnership with the Central European Research Infrastructure Consortium is one of the latest moves to try and improve success rates in getting finance from the EU start-up funder