Research organisations call for EU to preserve early-stage collaborative R&I in the next framework programme

Providing adequate support and funding for early-stage collaborative research is key to fostering the development of strong R&I ecosystems, and ultimately, the EU’s competitiveness, resilience and global leadership.

In this new statement, research organisations join forces to call for European policies to back collaboration in R&I. In short, collaborative research should not be exclusively limited to near-market, scale-up or deployment-oriented projects. The EU’s R&I framework programme needs to ensure additional opportunities for smaller-scale projects at lower technology readiness levels (TRLs), while the future European Competitiveness Fund could complement it by supporting projects further along in their development and implementation phases.

Collaboration, especially for early-stage research projects, is an essential strength of European R&I. For this reason, EUA has consistently advocated for measures to support collaborative research to be preserved in in the EU’s tenth R&I framework programme (FP10). For example, in ‘Paving the way for impactful European R&I’ – EUA’s vision paper for FP10, the Association stressed how collaboration significantly increases the programme’s impact by fostering cross-border, inter-sectoral partnerships and knowledge exchange.

Alongside EUA, the joint statement is endorsed by: the Coimbra Group, EU-LIFE, the Young European Research Universities Network (YERUN), the European Consortium of Innovative Universities (ECIU), Aurora, the European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities (EASSH), the Initiative for Science in Europe (ISE), the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA), the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), the Network on Universities from the Capitals of Europe (UNICA) and the European Children's Hospitals Organisation (ECHO).