Issue 16 spring 09

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Expert group members

The next European Framework Programme for research and development should focus on global excellence through European collaboration and competition, becoming a game-changing effort that is perhaps two or three times its current size. The Programme should be strong enough to become widely valued for its contribution to new knowledge, enhancing the quality of life of Europe’s citizens and solving global problems with global partners.

That’s the vision of a group of experts recruited by the European Commission to assess the effectiveness of the sixth Framework Programme (FP6). Their report finds that, although FP6 has had a number of positive consequences for the European research ecosystem, there is limited evidence that it has succeeded in creating new knowledge that has then been successfully exploited by industry. There are also concerns that the complexity of the programme is such that industrial participation has declined, compared with FP5 and FP4, the previous programmes.

Activities under FP6 have generated European added value

“The Expert Group believes that the activities under FP6, especially its core thematic priorities that constitute 65% of its total expenditures, have generated European added value, contributed generally towards increased industrial competitiveness, generated network externalities, and strengthened knowledge infrastructure in Europe,” says the report’s Executive Summary.

The programme

FP6, the Sixth Framework Programmes of the European Commission and Euratom, the European atomic research authority, ran from 2002 until 2006. Their combined budget of €19,235m represented about 4% of the combined public R&D budgets of the European Union member states.

The programme was given a complex set of high-level goals, such as: increasing the inventive and innovative capacity of the European Union; supporting the emergence of a European Research Area; identifying new research areas; as well as developing nuclear fusion and promoting nuclear safety. None of these were SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely – the normal criteria for well-defined goals in planning.

FP6 was also given a set of more specific goals, such as increasing the participation of female researchers, promoting the mobility of researchers, and servicing the needs of SMEs. This created a complex set of drivers for FP6, but offered little guidance about how the desired outcomes should be achieved, or how they could fit with other European Union and member state actions.

Participation and collaboration

The programme made 213 calls for proposals, attracted 56,000 proposals involving 390,000 potential participants, and awarded 10,000 contracts to 74,000 participants.

Direct industrial participation in the Framework Programme has continued to decline since FP4

There were some concerns about the winning proposals. The percentage of female co-ordinators in FP projects in 2006 was lower than the overall percentage of female researchers in Europe in 2003. Direct industrial participation in the Framework Programme has continued to decline since FP4, which raises questions about the perceived value of the FP concept for increasing the competitiveness of European industry. However, the picture is uneven: the aerospace and automotive industries participate strongly while the pharmaceutical, chemical and biotech industries appear to regard FP as too slow and time-consuming, based on models of collaboration that fail to reflect the business logic of those sectors.

The report also raised concerns about the level of participation of small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) and also about what is referred to as the ‘intervention logic’ for SME participation. This logic sets an arbitrary overall budgetary target for SMEs (15% of the total), rather than setting specific objectives linked to how SMEs operate and the value chains in which they participate. The expert group’s own analysis suggests that 6.1% of the FP6 budget went to SMEs. The Commission’s estimates suggest that 16% of industrial participants in FP6 came from SMEs and that 11% of its funding went to them, compared with 17% and 12%, respectively, in FP5. Both analyses were undermined by a lack of rigorous data about SME participation.

Although FP6 was also intended to increase collaboration with countries outside the European Union, only 7% of the contributions for partnering outside the Union went to developed countries, of which by far the largest beneficiary was the US. In an age of open innovation and global collaboration, the expert group felt that spending just €2.5 million a year on collaborations with the most powerful and inventive country on Earth demonstrated little sense of strategic purpose.

People and infrastructure

The human resources actions of the FPs are almost universally judged to be a major success

The expert group praised the Programme’s impact on the mobility of researchers, which is seen as an important way to disseminate knowledge and increase collaboration throughout and beyond the Union. The report says: “The human resources actions of the FPs are almost universally judged to be a major success… these actions have been a major driver towards the European Research Area and also provided opportunities for European researchers to build relationships with colleagues outside Europe, even if take-up could be improved.”

The FP6 human resources and mobility schemes involved 8,440 participants, who received an average of just over €20,000 each. Industrial participation was low, however, with just 6% of the successful participants coming from industry.

The expert groups also praised work under FP6 on creating national and pan-European research infrastructure, such as the scientific computing grid that supports major efforts such as the search for the Higgs Boson at CERN, and the new work on nuclear fusion that is being developed at ITER.

The FP process

The group was less enthusiastic about the implementation and management of FP6, whose burden of multiple ill-defined goals, complex structures and bureaucracy has made it difficult to engage with the Programme.

Complexity and lack of timeliness in administration have damaged the reputation of the Framework Programme

“Complexity and lack of timeliness in administration remain stains on the reputation of the FP both within and without Europe,” says the report, suggesting that the way the programme was administered damaged its public standing. “These flaws are a significant disincentive to participation… and have been cited as among the major factors contributing to the continuing decrease in industrial interest in the FP.

“In far too many ways, implementation acts against achieving the objectives that are being set for the FP.”

For example, it took an average of 365 days between a proposal being received and a contract being issued under FP6, with one application waiting almost four years (1396 days) for a contract to be granted.

“This is not quite international worst practice among RTD funders but comes very close to it,” the report comments.

Although bureaucracy is everywhere, its impact in FP6 has been to drive out participation from industry and smaller organisations that lack the financial and administrative resources to deal with FP processes. It also ensures that companies that do have the resources to work with the FP processes tend to become regular partners, which may drive out the diversity that the programme was supposed to foster.

The expert group suggests the FP process moves from offering contracts on the basis of cost, which is difficult and time consuming to assess fairly, to price. These contracts could be assessed by competitive bid and, in the case of large infrastructure projects, linked to results or, in the case of fundamental research, provided as grants. It also calls for radical simplification of FP processes, to increase the pace of the programme and broaden participation.

Quality and industrial competitiveness

In many countries, the ability to attract FP funding is regarded as a seal of quality

It seems clear that despite the complexity and bureaucracy of FP6, the actual work being done under the programme is of high quality. In many countries, the ability to attract FP funding is regarded as a seal of quality for the scientists, research groups and organisations involved. Some universities even offer matching funding to projects that win FP backing.

FP6 has also enabled important work to be carried out, which would have been difficult to fund in other ways, such as work on rare diseases that would have been difficult to fund at national level. Similarly, the programme is believed to have helped Europe maintain a lead in mobile telephony and grid computing, and to have strengthened its aerospace industry. There are also signs that FP6 has contributed to high-quality work in emerging disciplines such as sustainable development, where some projects contributed to the latest assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The impact on industrial competitiveness is less clear. FP participation in European and global standardisation efforts has strengthened the Swedish position in mobile telephony and vehicle safety. But Sweden’s life-science sector seems to have taken little benefit from FP6. Large companies use FP projects to engage in long-range research, develop industrial and technological partnerships, and to influence standards and explore markets. But they don’t use it for short-term product or process development.

Informal soundings by expert group members suggested that large European companies have worked out how to integrate FP projects into their overall research portfolios alongside other national and international projects. Disappointingly, though, these companies say that it is still simpler to create research networks in the US than in Europe, despite the shortcuts that the FP offers in terms of, for example, predefined rules about ownership of intellectual property in FP projects.

Vision

One of the issues with FP6 has been the burden of expectations laid upon it, which have ranged from strengthening Europe’s research infrastructure through increasing industrial competitiveness to addressing the gender imbalance in R&D and supporting SMEs.

The next FP should have a more clearly articulated current and future rationale

The expert group recommends that the next FP should have a more clearly articulated current and future rationale, and that the Commission should set a realistic set of goals within that context and ensure that these goals can actually be managed and monitored. It warns against allowing the next Framework Programme to become a substitute for effectively-linked national R&D policies, or a de-facto monopoly in European R&D collaborations.

Given the rising importance of open innovation, the group recommends that existing policies towards non-EU countries should be revised. Separate policies should be devised for working with developing countries, growth economies and with industrialised nations outside the EU, and more should be spent on collaborating with the growth economies and industrialised nations.

The report calls for a major overhaul of the way the FP is run, including using external consultants to look at its cost controls. It also suggests halving the time it takes to move from a proposal to a contract, moving contracts on to a price basis from a cost basis, and paying for pure research using grants rather than contracts.

The report also calls for greater efforts to involve SMEs in the FP in a more meaningful way, to address the gender gap and to use the FP to attract young people into science and technology.

While these recommendations point to current weaknesses, the expert group is very positive about the future and lays out a vision for the next Framework Programme that will take more risks and work in a more international way to secure Europe’s position as a partner in the global knowledge economy.

It is time for a confident, scientifically capable, innovative European knowledge society to engage strongly with the world

“It is time for a confident, scientifically capable, innovative European knowledge society to engage strongly with the world rather than defending itself from it or limiting itself to local concerns,” the report says. “This is not altruism but a necessity for survival: if Europe does not play the global game it faces a future of decline.”

The group suggests starting this engagement using two approaches: Grand Challenges and Great Ideas.

In the first, the Commission should take a top-down approach to defining public concerns, such as social cohesion, global security, education and climate change, as a series of Grand Challenges. These should be met by Great Ideas emerging in a bottom-up process from researchers, universities, research institutes, companies and others, and organised by something like the European Research Council. At the same time, an instrument should be created to promote the transfer of scientific results into industrial applications.

The expert group says that well-managed, well-organised efforts to implement its vision can easily justify a budget that is two to three times that of FP7.

It concludes: “We support such an increase, recognising that investment in science and technology may be the best response and a visionary step in the present times of economic crisis.”

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