Key stakeholders criticise Commission’s top-down Competitiveness Fund plans

• The European Commission is considering a mega-fund for research and innovation (R&I), but critical stakeholders say the loss of autonomy for individual funding projects is the opposite of what is needed

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has vowed to put R&I “at the heart of [the European] economy” as she set out guidelines for her second term ahead of her nomination in July, vowing to increase research spending and expand R&I programmes.

A leaked internal Commission proposal suggests that the EU executive may try to achieve this by merging existing initiatives into a massive European Competitiveness Fund (ECF) with a 'single rule and with all and strategic EU funding programmes.

This would bring significantly different programmes such as Horizon Europe, which funds scientific research and innovation, and InvestEU, which funds projects that support sustainable investment, innovation and job creation, under the same roof in the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), the EU budget for 2028-2034.

But for Maria Leptin, the president of the European Research Council (ERC), a key R&I programme, this may be a bad idea.

It “sounds good, looks good, but what some of these boxes [in the slide] say completely counters anything that we would hope for and that we would need,” Leptin told Euractiv.

According to the Commission's website, the ERC “is the premiere European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. "

“The ERC has been successful precisely because it has autonomy in deciding its own procedures and processes, and we need, if anything, more of that, not less,” Leptin added.

“Either [the designers of the proposal] don’t know what the ERC is about, or it looks like they will give up the excellence-based bottom-up approach of the last 17 years, which would be a very negative development,” said Kurt Deketelaere, Secretary-General for the League of European Research Universities (LERU), which represents 24 “leading” universities that warned against reducing ERC autonomy in a statement released Friday.

“I think that they have already taken a number of decisions, that they are just steering ahead and are going to take everybody by surprise,” he added.

But Leptin says there is insufficient context to interpret the leaked Commission slides.

“The diagram leaves open for everyone to see their worst fears or their greatest hopes in it depending on where they stand,” Leptin said.

However, while the Commission's plan for a competitiveness fund may not be final, it has attracted considerable attention, given the scale of the changes proposed.

On Friday, LERU called on the Commissioner and Director-General for R&I Iliana Ivanova and Marc Lemaître to break their “deafening silence” and clarify the ongoing discussions on the R&I framework in the next MFF.

“In the middle of next year, the Commission will come forward with its proposals” for the next MFF, Commission Spokesperson Eric Mamer said on 7 October when asked about the ECF plan, effectively declining to comment on the leak.

This is far too long for Deketelaere, who said that if FP10, the successor of the Horizon Europe programme, is scrapped, the research community has already wasted a lot of time writing reports on it.

“We are not going to waste [another] eight months by thinking that they are going for an evolution if they are really working on a revolution.”

"The one-size-fits-all is not the correct answer,” said Romanian MEP Siegfried Mureșan, vice-president of the centre-right European People's Party (EPP) group and co-rapporteur on the 2028-2034 EU budget.

The leaked presentation also proposes scrapping all cohesion, agricultural, fisheries and internal funds in favour of single national plans for each country, sparking strong reactions from mayors across the EU bloc.

Mureșan agreed that more scale, simplification, and flexibility were needed but remained sceptical about the proposals for the ECF and the national plans.

"You need autonomy, you need decentralisation, you need to give power to local, regional levels, to the universities themselves,” he said, echoing worries about “planning economy” risks.

Speaking to Euractiv, he framed these as general thoughts, reserving specific comments for when the Commission presents official proposals.

Deketelaere and LERU are hoping for some clarity from DG Research and Innovation when it presents its interim report on Horizon Europe on Wednesday; otherwise, Deketelaere said he would ask them during the presentation.

“We are going to push on this for as long as it is necessary,” he added.

Note:

Updated to specify that it is FP10, the successor programme of Horizon Europe, that could be scrapped, not Horizon Europe, the R&I programme in the current long-tem budget.