{"id":3577,"date":"2024-10-17T00:59:09","date_gmt":"2024-10-17T00:59:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/femmes-mag.net\/?p=3577"},"modified":"2024-10-17T00:59:09","modified_gmt":"2024-10-17T00:59:09","slug":"news-analysis-eu-needs-to-experiment-with-new-ri-funding-mechanisms-heitor-report-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/femmes-mag.net\/en\/news-analysis-eu-needs-to-experiment-with-new-ri-funding-mechanisms-heitor-report-says\/","title":{"rendered":"News analysis: EU needs to experiment with new R&I funding mechanisms, Heitor report says"},"content":{"rendered":"

The way the EU funds research and innovation isn\u2019t really working, and the European Commission urgently needs to experiment with new ways to do it, according to a new\u00a0influential report<\/a>\u00a0on the future of the EU\u2019s research and innovation framework programmes published today.<\/p>\n

The report, prepared by a group of 15 experts led by former Portuguese science minister Manuel Heitor, is stuffed to the brim with ideas for new councils, efficiencies and restructurings.<\/p>\n

But beneath these concrete proposals, there\u2019s a deeper, damning message: \u201cDisruptive, paradigm shifting research and innovation\u201d, the report says, the kind that remakes entire economies or societies, is \u201cunlikely to be fostered by conventional procedures and programmes that are prevalent in the EU today\u201d.<\/p>\n

In a stark admission, the report prepared by the 15 experts picked by the European Commission, says that most EU, and indeed national, research programmes support only \u201cincremental scientific advances, development and innovation\u201d rather than paradigm shifts.<\/p>\n

Agencies across the world are experimenting with new types of funding and the EU must join this wave, or risk being left behind, Heitor warned in an interview with Science|Business. \u201cThere is a need for Europe to lead this process,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The report wants the EU to \u201cimmediately\u201d establish an \u201cexperiment unit\u201d to test out \u201cnew programmes, evaluation procedures and instruments\u201d.<\/p>\n

Based in the Commission\u2019s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, this unit needs a \u201csignificant budget\u201d and \u201cmaximum flexibility\u201d from normal rules to allow it to rapidly toy with new methods of funding, the report demands.<\/p>\n

The EU shouldn\u2019t wait until the next framework programme to get cracking, Heitor stresses. \u201cWe have three years of Horizon Europe [\u2026] to test these new things,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

This is part of a broader narrative that research is failing to deliver, not just in Europe, but globally.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe science system, for all of its rhetorical promise, has failed at that downstream end to yield the kind of advances at the speed, at the quantity that perhaps had been promised, expected, hoped,\u201d said James Wilsdon, executive director of the London-based Research on Research Institute, and professor of research policy at University College London.<\/p>\n

Over the past decade, there have been a drumbeat of warnings to this effect.<\/p>\n

A major study<\/a>\u00a0released last year concluded that \u201cpapers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions\u201d.<\/p>\n

And a paucity of new inventions has led to stagnation for the average person, so goes the argument. The US economist Robert Gordon, for example, has argued that since the 1970s, there have been far fewer life-changing (and beneficial) new technologies like the fridge, car or indoor plumbing, as the low-hanging fruit of industrial development has already been picked. Low growth is now the norm.<\/p>\n

Fresh funding ideas<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yet partly in response to these warnings, there\u2019s also been a flowering of experimentation with new ways to fund research and innovation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is something in the air,\u201d said Wilsdon. A dozen or more countries have launched some form of initiative into \u201cmetascience\u201d, which, put simply, applies \u201cscientific approaches to the management [\u2026] of the funding system,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Most of these so far have been small scale pilot schemes, he said, but hope now is that bigger, more rigorous trials can shed light on what works.<\/p>\n

Some of these aim to give funding to more risky research proposals, like giving grant reviewers a \u201cgolden ticket<\/a>\u201d to back a proposal, even if other reviewers object.<\/p>\n

During the pandemic, one US-based fund rolled out \u201cFast Grants<\/a>\u201d for researchers who urgently needed money to study Covid-19, overcoming the tediously long wait for money often endured by scientists.<\/p>\n

The US\u2019s 2022 CHIPs and Science Act has mandated the country\u2019s\u00a0National Science Foundation<\/a>\u00a0to toy with new funding and assessment ideas.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, the UK\u2019s main funder, UK Research and Innovation, and the US-based foundation Open Philanthropy, put out a\u00a0joint \u00a35 million call<\/a> of metascience grants to explore \u201cmore effective ways of conducting and supporting research and development\u201d<\/p>\n

Canadian agencies have also\u00a0launched metascience<\/a>\u00a0initiatives, and there\u2019s strong interest in metascience in Japan and\u00a0China<\/a>\u00a0too, said Wilsdon.<\/p>\n

And on both sides of the Atlantic, a new set of innovation-focused institutions have been set up, modelled on the US\u2019s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which, among other features, gives huge budgets and leeway to programme managers to back disruptive new projects.<\/p>\n

Washington has recently established a new Arpa in health, while the UK and\u00a0Germany<\/a>\u00a0have followed with their own Arpa-like organisations.<\/p>\n

A range of ideas<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Heitor report offers a grab-bag of ideas, ranging across the whole R&D spectrum, for the new experimental unit to try.<\/p>\n

\"New<\/p>\n

At the research grant level, for example, \u201cdistributed peer review\u201d asks applicants to grant schemes to also review other proposals, in order to relieve the burden on unpaid reviewers.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Volkswagen Foundation<\/a>\u00a0in Germany is currently running a trial of this idea; so far, feedback is positive, and the hope is that it will end up selecting more adventurous proposals than conventional panel review.<\/p>\n

At the other end of the R&D process, the Heitor report also recommends aping the US-based XPrize Foundation, which offers up sometimes huge prize pots for solving challenges ranging from carbon dioxide removal to better facemasks. \u201cCurrently the EIC [European Innovation Council] has no programmes to stimulate disruptive innovation,\u201d it says, and prizes could be an answer.<\/p>\n

The Commission has indeed experimented with prizes in the past, and is mulling over a new tranche for\u00a0renewable energy technology<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But the sums are tiny compared to what\u2019s offered by the XPrize Foundation;\u00a0one ongoing prize<\/a>\u00a0offers a $119 million pot for anyone who can find new ways to desalinate water (it\u2019s funded by a foundation linked to the Saudi royal family).<\/p>\n

Speed of the essence<\/strong><\/p>\n

This new unit needs to incorporate \u201cfast time to funding\u201d, the Heitor report says. Indeed, the report is shot through with the sense that the application process needs to significantly accelerate.<\/p>\n

It takes almost a year for applications to be processed, Heitor complained to Science|Business. Horizon Europe is actually taking longer to process applications than its predecessor, Horizon 2020, according to an\u00a0analysis<\/a>\u00a0of part of the programme released earlier this year.<\/p>\n

The whole programme needs \u201ca radical reform of the application system to \u2018trust first\/evaluate later\u2019 and become more applicant-friendly, Commission-efficient, impact-oriented and ensure a reduced time to fund,\u201d his report says.<\/p>\n

The German innovation agency\u00a0Sprind<\/a>\u00a0has explicitly tried to make grants as quick as possible, with at most four weeks between an application deadline and wiring the money. Take too long, and teams of innovators will lose momentum and commercial opportunities, the agency argues.<\/p>\n

ARPA on the Horizon?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Heitor\u2019s report is also the second heavyweight Brussels report in as many months to call for the EU to establish its own Darpa \u2013 or at least a kind of Darpa-inspired innovation agency.<\/p>\n

The first was a\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0by former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi last month, which made an EU Arpa its top research and innovation recommendation.<\/p>\n

Like the Draghi report, Heitor wants the EIC to begin experimenting with Arpa-type programmes. These normally give programme managers high levels of funding and discretion to back innovation projects that achieve a specific goal \u2013 backed up by strict milestones and a willingness to pull the plug on failing ideas.<\/p>\n

If this model succeeds in the EIC, it could be rolled out to other areas of the framework programme, the report says.<\/p>\n

But Heitor\u2019s report also adds quite a few caveats to the Arpa idea \u2013 you already need an existing ecosystem of innovators ready to respond to problems set by the agency, it points out.<\/p>\n

It will also not be \u201cstraightforward\u201d to hire very highly paid, unconstrained programme managers given labour laws in EU countries, cautioned Heitor.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Arpa model will never work exactly in Europe, but we can adopt other things [from it],\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The way the EU funds research and innovation isn\u2019t really working, and the European Commission urgently needs to experiment with new ways to do it, according to a new\u00a0influential report\u00a0on the future of the EU\u2019s research and innovation framework programmes published today. The report, prepared by a group of 15 experts led by former Portuguese …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3578,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[115,112,116],"class_list":["post-3577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trends","tag-business-en","tag-fresh-en","tag-tech-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/femmes-mag.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/femmes-mag.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/femmes-mag.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/femmes-mag.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/femmes-mag.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3577"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/femmes-mag.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3583,"href":"https:\/\/femmes-mag.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3577\/revisions\/3583"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/femmes-mag.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/femmes-mag.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/femmes-mag.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/femmes-mag.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}