EAI Green Paper - Common Strategic Framework for Research and Innovation
Earlier this year, the Strategic forum made a joint contribution to the Green Paper on a Common Strategic Framework for future EU Research and Innovation Funding. This response was in fact recently quoted in the Final Report of the Horizon 2020 Workshop on Future and Emerging Technologies, available here for download.
EAI Green Paper
EAI Vision of the COMMON STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK FOR RESEARCH AND INNOVATION
The European Alliance for Innovation (EAI) is a large grassroots movement set up to address the global challenges of Europe’s future competitiveness through innovation. Because the EU funding programmes are critical in meeting these challenges, the Strategic Forum of the EAI welcomes the opportunity to comment on the EC Green Paper concerning a Common Strategic Framework (CSF) for future EU research and innovation (R&I) funding.
I. Objectives for the CSF
The CSF must be based on the “principle of competitiveness”. Competitiveness of Europe, its industries, its SMEs, its universities, its research community, it must be the overarching principle upon which all actions must be based.
The CSF must have three key goals: Serve the European citizen
Accelerate the pace of scientific disruptions
Strengthen European industry and create new and innovative industries
For this, the CSF must establish the necessary conditions required for the implementation of the Innovation Cycle described below:
II. Structural priorities
Many of the barriers to the translation of European scientific and technological capability along the Innovation Cycle and into societal benefit are well known (and, indeed are documented in the Green Paper), but have not been overcome.
There are three structural obstacles that must be tackled in priority:
The way in which the Financial Regulations have been applied to R&I programmes have strangled them, and reduced the level of risk and ambition in the programme
Overall the current programme is daunting in its complexity. The programmes have evolved over the years, offering now a plethora of research actions and initiatives, often with different rules and conditions.
The structure of the administration of the programmes in a set of silos hampers the transfer of technology along the Innovation Cycle, leads to duplication and overlapping between disciplines, and militates against innovation
III. Fostering innovation
Efforts are now indispensable in what concerns the transformation of our economies, recognizing the impact of the digital revolution and consequent evolution of the job markets, along with the ageing population drift. The innovation landscape in industry has changed dramatically over the last few years (increased importance of SME sector for innovation, open innovation approaches, transformation of services etc.). The CSF should fully exploit the extraordinary enabling power of information and communications sciences and technologies.
There has been a consistent emphasis on increasing the involvement of SMEs in the Framework Programmes, but FP7's processes, time-scales and culture are still designed for larger enterprises. An innovation mindset should drive the definition of the CSF architecture, its instruments, and its procedures. The CSF must create mechanisms and eco-systems for research results to be exploited in the benefit of the European society. It should adapt to the fact that brilliant scientists are not necessarily the best businesspersons.
Architecturally, the CSF must:
Implement measures in all sectors of the Innovation Cycle. There are a range of mechanisms and interventions that must be put in place, including new integration instruments, to support the conversion of research output into social capital. The CSF could establish a sort of innovation agency that provides the research community with exposure to potential investors and business plans development
IV.
Simplify rules, conditions, and regulations. Ensure that all new mechanisms are designed to be specifically appropriate for the actors and outcomes that are sought, making extensive use of simple but large coordination mechanisms
Improve the coordination of services within the European commission in order to combat internal fragmentation of responsibilities for the Innovation Cycle
Provide a simple and consistent interface to potential contributors
Exploratory cooperative research
The CSF must intensify the flow of new research results that will feed European growth via the Innovation Cycle. The part of exploratory, non-thematic research must be increased, mainly for projects of a cooperative nature, since they strengthen the ERA and combat fragmentation. The ERC is a proven asset, although its rules should be adapted to EU tax-payers’ return on investment. Large but light coordination networks must be implemented.
Transdisciplinary research projects, young researchers, and SME participation should be at the core of the CSF. In this respect the Marie Curie fellowships must be an integral part of the CSF. The Marie Curie Industry-Academia Partnerships and Pathways (IAPP) mechanism is to be greatly reinforced, given that it is perfectly adapted to the Innovation Cycle.
The CSF should support the creation and expansion of research infrastructures, both distributed and networked based (e.g. Geant). They are an essential tool for experimentation, testing and network architecture orientation, providing a further fertile ground for technological and service disruptions that may shape the future innovation landscape. This effort should be complemented by easy access to large scale facilities for measuring, storage and processing. This will guarantee the experimentation and demonstration of value added services and the discovery of emerging patterns in large data repositories, serving the needs of industry and SMEs.
Further ideas
While the bulk of the research efforts and funding is realized at national Member State level, the European Union provides the only setting where common problems can be identified and common solutions offered to the market and society. Better synergies must be realized where possible to ensure that solutions developed at national and regional level can be adequately leveraged and implemented at European level.
The European Commission must take the initiative to pull together its services and offer a market oriented approach to the exploitation of research results. Communicating to the public at large what has been achieved in research, offering to mediate in the setting of specifications and standards that may be required for the adoption of technologies and services at EU level,
assisting SMEs to understand how to address their markets and how to protect their IPR, are some of the missions that the European Commission could take.
European research should not be seen in isolation from similar activities undertaken elsewhere in the world. Europe should take steps to become a pole of attraction to the many non European researchers. Its international cooperation programs, notably with organizations from emerging economies, must imperatively be based on the principle of reciprocity. Today the European scientific competitiveness is being eroded by the acceptance of partners from countries who do not meet the principle of reciprocity.
a) Serve the European citizen
The CSF must frontally address and provide solutions to the societal challenges ahead. The choice of these societal challenges must be limited and priorities must be set on the basis of common policy requirements of the European Union such as those outlined in the Europe 2020, Digital Agenda, Innovation Union, SET-Plan etc.
The research roadmaps for the societal challenges must be developed jointly by all concerned European stakeholders including where warranted, the best experiences and successful developments reached at national level.
The range of activities undertaken within the CSF in response to the identified societal challenges should cover a continuum of activities from fundamental research to demonstrators, pilots and exploitation of results. Approaches based on the concepts explored within Living Labs should be used to stimulate the user participation notably at the level of application development.
Serving the needs of people require a radical departure from the award of silo-based projects to the award of coherent Innovation Partnerships, driven by the same goals, with similar milestones. Coherence of action and market impact can only be realized through the pulling together of resources, know-how and the understanding of large area markets.
The European Commission must define the right settings for public-private partnerships, from theme definition to proposal submission, from proposal evaluation to program implementation.
Member States should commit to the pre-commercial procurement of the technological and service solutions at the exploitation phase.
Extensive use should be made of the Cohesion policy funds to enhance the capacity of regional economies to adopt the innovative products and services developed within the CSF.
The European Commission should use its regulatory powers to overcome the multiple impediments to the single market for services.
Competitiveness: Of course, research and innovation to this goal is aimed at solving societal challenges common across the globe. It is important to humanity that we are able to address these issues. Applying the over-simple calculus of the contribution to “European competitiveness”, there are two components:
- reducing the burden of these challenges on GDP, by enabling services to be delivered more efficiently
- these are global challenges, so good solutions can compete in a global market place
On the efficient delivery of services, ICT will play an increasing role as an enabler with some commonality across different areas. This points to the importance of a coherent programme, to ultimately create a leverage across common issues, as well as sharing of insights. On the second point, it is important to accompany the technical research with some consideration of business models, and exploration of global opportunities.
b) Accelerate the pace of scientific disruptions
The current framework of research has served relatively well the research community both in terms of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) open or proactive schemes in the Information Society Technologies theme and in terms of the European Research Council (ERC) characterized by accepting non-predefined topics. Both roadmap as well as open ended approaches within FET have their merits and must be maintained, with additional focus being given to harness the results achieved and prepare the ground for their early take-up within the societal or industrial challenges based schemes.
It must be recognized that new scientific domains and new scientific methodologies are flourishing thanks to the use Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies (ICST) in all disciplines. ICST is both a scientific domain in its own and an enabler of others. The latter is currently particularly visible in Life Sciences, but ICST is beginning to change the way Social Sciences and Humanities work. Therefore, the word "Sciences" must be connected to ICT (as in ICST) and bottom-up research in ICST both as a domain and as an enabler must be boosted.
As an example of this and in order to provide a further fertile ground for technological and service disruptions that may shape the future innovation landscape, the CSF should strengthen its support to the creation and expansion of research infrastructures, both distributed and networked based (e.g. Geant). Such infrastructures provide the research community with an essential tool for experimentation, testing and network architecture orientation.
Also, to serve the needs of industry and SMEs, the effort in the deployment of network based research infrastructures should be complemented by efforts in the access to large scale facilities for measuring, storage and processing. This will guarantee the experimentation and demonstration of value added services and the discovery of emerging patterns in large data repositories.
The European Commission must ensure that budgetary efforts towards the acceleration of the pace of scientific disruptions are complemented by actions and initiatives towards the bridging across multiple science silos.
The European Commission must create mechanisms to assist researchers in the protection of the Intellectual Property Rights and provide on-demand support for start-up creation.
The European Commission must take a pro-active attitude towards enforcing the exposure of the research actors to the realities of the market place, by offering advice on tools for accessing financial resources, for establishing and developing business plans and for acquiring entrepreneurial skills and know-how.
c) Strengthen European industry and create new and innovative industries
Support must be provided to today’s European industries in need of innovative tools, processes or business models while a significant effort must be undertaken to ensure the creation and viability of tomorrow’s industries. It must be recognized that all possible themes of research that may be put forward are underpinned by ICT technologies. The setting of priorities and funding must recognize the role of ICT in domains as varied as health, transport, environment control, energy, finances, content creation and delivery, telecommunications etc.
Today's industry: The CSF must cater to the research and innovation requirements of industry at large either in the services sector or in the infrastructure and technology sectors. A number of industrial challenges must be catered for, particularly in technological domains related to infrastructures (e.g. smart grids, smart cities, future Internet) and product manufacturing (e.g. smart meters). It appears equally important to define industrial challenges for cyber security, high performance computing etc.
The European Commission should use its regulatory powers to guide and steer industry towards the development of pan-European specifications, standards or interoperability required by the EU wide market place.
The European Commission should also devote an adequate space to road-mapping processes, so as to create a shared perspective across an industry sector, encouraging value chain collaboration, and considerably reducing risk. The role played by ETPs in this sense, represents a virtuous example and a relatively inexpensive added value for EC funding. It is very important to democratize this process, to “crowd-source” the work and to include SMEs.
Growing tomorrow’s giants: Active steps must be taken to facilitate the participation of SMEs in the research and innovation programs. Such steps should not only be based on the financial aspect but also take into consideration other factors which affect SMEs in their approach to Innovation such as access to research findings and results, to adequate channels magnifying the business opportunities for their services and for their size and scope. To enhance the participation of SMEs, the European Commission is invited to elaborate evaluation systems which cater for more risk-tolerant approaches thereby recognizing the specificities of SME’s, in terms of human resources, financial capabilities and extremely reduced administrative overheads.
The European Commission should recognize and take steps to distinguish the variety of SMEs from the very small ones with a staff of 15 to larger ones with a staff of 250. Actions are required to help the very small start-ups.
Research programmes initiated by the European Commission, must cater for the development of alternative solutions to similar problems. The European Commission should be seen and should act as the provider of opportunities with the actual market decisions being taken by the market stakeholders.
d) Setting the right budgetary balances
A number of potential options may be considered regarding the setting of budgetary balances between themes, schemes, actions, etc. The determination of the right set of options must be guided by the imperative need to move towards an innovation, exploitation and entrepreneurial mind set. It must equally be guided by the need for the CSF to respond to EU-wide policy objectives that have been set.
EU wide research efforts and their balance across the three goals set in this paper, should not mimic what is done at national level, but rather address problems and challenges common to all. Its essential value lies in its mobilizing effect and in its unique capability to offer a platform for strengthening the collective competitiveness of Europe.
Budgetary balances must also be set so as recognize the differences between objective driven R&I, and science driven research. It is the view of the EAI that the challenges and policy principles that have been set at EU level call for support to be given to innovation and exploitation type activities. However this should not result in isolated activities distinct from the main stream R&D actions, but rather be fully integrated in them.
