Draft Council Conclusions on Interim Evaluation of Horizon 2020 and FP9
The Council of the European Union has recently published its draft Conclusions 'From the Interim Evaluation of Horizon 2020 towards the Ninth Framework Programme'.
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In the first part of the document, representatives of the EU Member States address the need for increasing the impact of R&I in Europe and in the second one, they present key principles, which should drive the preparation of the Ninth Framework Programme (FP9). In the first section, the Council calls on the Member States to increase their investment in R&I to jointly reach the 3% goal set out in the Europe 2020 Strategy and encourages further coherence of FPs with other EU funding programmes.
In the second section, the Council addresses the following issues: EU added value; putting R&I at the service of society; rationalisation of the R&I funding landscape; openness and accessibility; implementation, and calls for the following:
- Ensuring that EU added value is at the centre of designing and implementing FP9;
- Developing a common action plan for the Member States and the EU to enhance communication and interaction with society and stakeholders, and foster the dissemination and exploitation of results across Europe;
- Establishing stronger links between the European Research Area and the European Higher Education Area;
- Finding ways to streamline and rationalise the EU R&I funding landscape, e.g. by merging similar instruments;
- Establishing a process for setting up a roadmap covering the whole lifespan of all large-scale long-term partnership initiatives, such as the JTIs, Art.185 initiatives and others;
- Simplifying the procedures related to EIT Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs);
- Ensuring that the European Innovation Council offers significant added value and helps strengthen the entire innovation ecosystem;
- Ensuring better synergies between FPs and other EU funding instruments;
- Further addressing the participation gap and the innovation divide among EU Member States;
- Exploring ways to reduce the current significant oversubscription to Horizon 2020 and increasing accessibility in FP9;
- Ensuring that FPs provide sufficient funding for frontier research not only through individual but also collaborative research and that grants continue to be the main form of funding in the FPs;
- Further simplification and harmonisation of the FPs and establishing a comprehensive monitoring and evaluation framework with a set of indicators applying across the programme.
