EU needs to experiment with new R&I funding – Heitor report

The way the European Union funds research and innovation isn’t really working, and the European Commission urgently needs to experiment with new ways to do it, according to a new influential report on the future of the EU’s research and innovation framework programmes published on 16 October, writes David Matthews for Science|Business.

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.

But beneath these concrete proposals, there’s a deeper, damning message: “Disruptive, paradigm shifting research and innovation,” the report says, the kind that remakes entire economies or societies, is “unlikely to be fostered by conventional procedures and programmes that are prevalent in the EU today.” In a stark admission, the report says that most EU, and indeed national, research programmes support only “incremental scientific advances, development and innovation” rather than paradigm shifts.
Full report on the Science|Business site