With all the static in the lead up to the UK leaving the EU last year, you would be forgiven for having missed the main points of the EU’s new Framework Programme that will provide €95.5bn for research and innovation between 2021-27. So what do you need to know?
The UK can take part
There was a *lot* of discussion before Brexit about whether the UK would be able to engage with European funding; we covered this here, and looked at the alternative options that were being mooted.
Since then it has been agreed that the UK will be an ‘associated country’. This means it will contribute to the budget of Horizon Europe, and its researchers can therefore apply to all of its schemes, with the exception of Erasmus+. The UK government is planning to put in place the Turing scheme as an alternative to this.
However, do be aware that the UK’s participation in other EU funding has not been agreed, so schemes such as Creative Europe and Life will be off-limits.
Start date
Well, the start date is, um, a work in progress. Although the content is all done and dusted, some of the regulatory framework is still to be finalised. We’re currently thinking it will start in April 2021 – although, confusingly, some of the European Research Council (ERC) deadlines are actually in March.
Work Programmes
If you want to find out more about the content of the calls and what the EU actually wants from the research, you need to turn to the relevant work programme (WP). These are somewhat intimdating, often running to hundreds of pages. However, you can usually cut to the chase and look at the part of the work programme that is relevant to your specific call and your specific topic.
In the past, WPs have been incredibly prescriptive. For Horizon Europe, the Commission has introduced the idea of ‘destinations’. In other words, they set out what they want the end goal to be, and it’s up to you to decide how to get there. Radical, eh?
Structure
The structure of Horizon Europe is very similar to that for H2020, with three ‘pillars’ and a series of cross-cutting themes.
- Pillar 1: Excellent Science. This covers the ‘responsive mode’-type funding, such as the ERC and Marie Curie. In other words, these are the schemes where you come up with the focus of the research, and it’s down to the excellence of your proposed research (and the competition, of course) as to whether you’re funded. There’s not much change with the ERC, but the Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions (MSCA) have been renamed to:
- MSCA Doctorates (formerly known as Innovative Training Networks, or ITNs)
- MSCA Postdocs (formerly known as Individual Fellowships)
- MSCA Staff Exchanges (formerly known as Research and Innovation Staff Exchange, or RISE)
- MSCA COFUND (formerly known as, um, COFUND. Alright, you got me: that’s not changing).
- Pillar 2: Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness. In H2020 this used to be ‘societal challenges’, so you can see the change in emphasis. The ‘clusters’ within this are:
- Health
- Culture, creativity and inclusive society
- Civil security for society
- Digital, industry and space
- Climate, energy and mobility
- Food, bioeconomy, natural resources, agriculture and the environment.
- However, the big news under Pillar 2 are the Missions. These will swallow up to 10% of the budget of the pillar, and are intended to provide the interdisciplinary critical mass to tackle specific challenges. Those challenges are:
- Adaption to climate change including societal transformation
- Cancer
- Healthy oceans, seas, coastal waters and inland waters
- Climate-neutral and smart cities
- Soil health and food.
- Pillar 3: Innovative Europe. This is home to the EIC; it is structured into eight Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) in areas such as climate, health and energy. Funding for these will come through two schemes:
- Pathfinder: this will be based on the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) schemes of H2020, which were hugely popular.
- Accelerator: this will be based on the SME Instrument in H2020.
Simplification – again
If you’ve been working in this area for some time, you know that each framework programme promises to simplify the processes and the bureaucracy. And, to be fair, they sometimes achieve it: FP7 is the case in point.
So, in keeping with tradition, Horizon Europe is promising to simplify things by:
- Less complex work programmes
- Specify expected outcomes – or ‘destinations’ that we mentioned above, being less prescriptive about the journey
- Reduce the size of the application and the amount of information requested
- Having one grant agreement for all centrally-managed calls
- THERE’LL BE NO TIMESHEETS! I know, I know, I know.
Assessing applications
All applications will be assessed on three criteria, which are the same as were used for Horizon 2020:
- Excellence
- Impact
- Implementation
However, the Commission is suggesting that it will try some new things, like ‘blind evaluation’ and a ‘right to react’ mechanism. Could be interesting and is certainly a step in the right direction.
Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash