Dear Imechanica friend

 a recent Nature Commentary has generated a lot of interest,
particularly in Europe. Maybe it is of interest, also in response to
Grand Challenges for Engineering?

Europe’s research system must change
Science funding in the European Union needs to be revised to better serve economic, social and
environmental goals, Luke Georghiou argues.
For researchers in Europe, the Framework
Programmes have become a familiar
funding source for projects and mobility.
They account, however, for only about 5% of
total public-research money1. Since 2000, the
European Commission has sought to extend
cooperation beyond its own programmes into
the remaining 95% of public research, which
is funded by national governments. It is doing
so under the concept of the European Research
Area (ERA) — that we at the Commission’s
ERA Rationales Expert Group have advised2
— using measures such as improving crossborder
access to infrastructures, coordinating
national research programmes and facilitating
researcher mobility.
During the past year a consultative green
paper has set out ideas for a relaunch of the
ERA3. This followed some innovation in the
Seventh Framework Programme, which
included the foundation of the European
Research Council (a funding body for investigator-
driven research allocated through
Europe-wide competition) and the industryled
Joint Technology Initiatives — such as the
Innovative Medicines initiative for pharmaceuticals
and the Clean Sky initiative for green aircraft
manufacture and operation — which can
be worth up to €1 billion (US$1.5 billion) each.
In essence Brussels has proposed ‘more of the
same and better’ to make the public-research
system function more effectively.
These measures do not get to the core of why
we need the ERA. They do not reach out beyond
the research community to appeal to politicians,
business or the general public. There is
the chance of a major transfer of resources from
agricultural subsidies to research and innovation
with a new budget settlement and financial
framework due for the European Union (EU).
Having as the flagship policy one that focuses
on remedies for perceived failings
in the research system lacks
ambition commensurate with
this broader vision.
Radical approach
We need a shift in thinking from deficit to
opportunity. We must make a convincing case
for increased investment in research by both
the European Union and national governments.
This will help us attain Europe’s economic,
social and environmental goals.
Making that case requires a radically new
approach to European research. Three key areas
of action are needed. First, Europe’s research
system must respond to a series of ‘grand challenges’.
Second, Europe must become more
research-friendly. This requires major reforms
for many types of institution and the policies
that support them. It also means that the
ERA should extend to private as well as public
research. Third, Europe’s strategic and applied
research must be re-orientated at a pan-European
level to support the full range of policies
that member states have agreed. This involves
the Framework Programme and national programmes
— coordinated through ERA-NET
schemes and other instruments — engaging
much more effectively with policy needs
in areas such as the environment, transport,
energy, agriculture and health.
Basic research has an
important place, and promoting
excellence through the
European Research Council,
and building research capacity
through mobility programmes are worthy
goals that deserve more support. But the
bulk of the Framework Programme budget
is in strategic and applied research so we
need to think more deeply about its aims
and future direction. Officially the budget is
there to support European competitiveness
and public policies. Despite some significant
achievements, successive evaluations strain
to provide any overall picture of impact4.
Existing structures have in general failed to
provide the kind of linkage that could allow
research to efficiently support economic and
social priorities. National delegates return from
European meetings with their performance
indicator being the budget share their nationals
obtain — ‘juste retour’ — rather than the
benefit their country sees from that money.
Grand challenges
Historically Europe has been at its best when
dealing with large projects based on public–
private partnerships. These include: the
development of the Global System for Mobile
Communications — better known as GSM
— as the standard for mobile telephony; the
emergence of Airbus as a global player; the
ubiquitous use of nuclear energy in France;
economic leadership in wind energy; and
scientific leadership at CERN, Europe’s particle-
physics laboratory near Geneva. Similarly,
in the United States and Japan many
world-shaping innovations have emerged
from grand challenges and coordinated
efforts, such as the atom bomb, spaceflight,
semiconductors and the Internet.
Such projects created the conditions for

entrepreneurs and individual scientists or
engineers to seize opportunities. Governments
provided funding and constructed markets
through effective regulation and procurement.
Programmes may now need to be more
agile to keep pace with rapidly moving fields;
nonetheless the lessons of scale, vision and
commitment are clear.
The grand challenges will probably require a
more direct political appeal to get going. They
should engage research with the problems that
society recognizes as central, such as climate
change, food and energy security and the ageing
of western society. For these, the initiative
will have to come from governments rather
than business, although many business opportunities
will emerge as initiatives unfold.
European governments cannot rely solely on
the Framework Programme budget; they will
have to coordinate their national budgets by
accepting leadership of sub-sections of larger
programmes, and by funding the participation
of their own nationals at the very least. The
challenges must be of a clear trans-national
nature and require a minimum level of effort
that cannot be achieved by nations acting
alone. They must also be feasible: there must
be a base of research and industrial capability
to build on and a viable implementation path.
And of course research must be a necessary
and important part of the solution.
Right condition, right coalition
An exemplary response to a grand challenge
may have recently emerged. Achieving a lowcarbon
future is arguably the single greatest
test facing us all. The recently announced
European Strategic Energy Technology Plan
(SET-Plan) describes itself as a “far-reaching
jigsaw of policies and measures”. These include
binding targets for 2020: a 20% reduction in
greenhouse-gas emissions; 20% of renewable
energy sources in the EU energy mix; reducing
primary energy use by 20%; carbon pricing;
a competitive Internal Energy Market and
an international energy policy. Central to this
plan is the need to accelerate the development
of cost-effective low-carbon technologies.
The challenge here is great. Energy research
has stagnated for decades, with total EU public
spending falling to a quarter of 1980 levels
in real terms and substantial declines in the
private sector as well5. Energy innovation is
particularly difficult, involving very large
investments with long lead times and lock-in
to existing infrastructures. New technologies
face social acceptance issues and often begin
by being more expensive than the sources they
are intended to replace.
On the other hand, addressing climate
change offers huge opportunities to develop
business and employment. With similar investment
decisions in other major economies
there is a strong competitiveness rationale.
The SET-Plan has also developed a series of
key technology goals for 2050. These include
second-generation sustainable biofuels,
CO2 capture, and large-scale commercialization
of renewable energy, energy conversion
and efficiency. A high-level multi-government
steering group will oversee the SET-Plan
implementation, engaging with all stakeholders.
Among other actions a series of industrial
projects resembling the Joint Technology
Initiatives will be launched. The hardest part
will be securing the necessary finance.
We need ways to identify and mobilize similar,
necessary coalitions of interest in other
areas. Arguably, the SET-Plan has arisen from
a once-in-a-lifetime coincidence of practical
urgency, political will and technological opportunity.
With grand challenges potentially costing
€5 billion to €10 billion each, it is hard to
see Europe affording more than three or four at
a time even with an increased budget.
To pinpoint these ways, a new kind of political
process is needed that combines top–down
and bottom–up approaches.
A bottom–up phase would
encourage stakeholders to
form ‘platforms’ to develop
potential responses to challenges.
Like the present technology
platforms, these would have a wider
base of participation: science; business users
and suppliers; government policy-makers,
regulators and purchasers; and where relevant,
non-governmental organizations and
consumer groups. These would use targeted
foresight to bring together socioeconomic
demand and the potential of innovation and
act as both incubator and lobby. The aim is not
to follow the now discredited idea of picking
winners among firms or even technologies (e.g.
joint programmes for high-definition television
that have now been abandoned), rather to
create a competitive and supportive environment
in which winning solutions emerge. The
top–down element will require, at the highest
political level, a capacity to find resources very
quickly when a viable strategy has emerged.
The core budget would come from a fund
deployed until exhausted6.
Policy-focused
There is currently only a very general communication
between the research carried out at
European level and the European-level policy
and regulation setting. This is true both for
the Framework Programme and for the ERANETS
that have begun to link national funding
bodies. Indeed it is a problem that besets much
national applied research. New kinds of coordination
are needed to link users and sponsors
of research, at European and at national
levels. This does not mean a crude customer–
contractor relationship that often causes
research to degenerate into consultancy. It does
mean that regulating bodies, such as the sectoral
Directorates-General, will need a greater
voice in establishing the research agenda and
greater scientific capability to do so.
Neither the grand challenges nor the policyfocused
research can be achieved through the
present research system. This is where the new
ecology comes in. It must consist of reformed
actors and better linkages between them to
configure research around these interdisciplinary
challenges7. The long list of reforms that
are overdue includes: giving greater strategic
space and autonomy to universities; more
trans-national peer review to raise quality
levels; developing a true European market for
applied research services (cross-border trade
in applied research accounts for a negligible
share of a market worth billions); and creating
a market friendly to innovation through smart
regulation and public procurement8.
Europe has to let go of structures and
approaches that have dominated its research
funding for decades. First to go should be
Framework Programmes that are divided
into large numbers of small, very loosely connected
projects defined years ahead by ‘work
plans’ with no clear provenance.
These instruments
may satisfy the clientele they
fund, but they are almost
impossible to direct towards
real problems. The funding
breakdown needs to be tied to the big- and the
medium-level challenges that policy dictates.
Enough flexibility must be retained to respond
to shifts in demand and to new scientific and
technological opportunities. Researchers worried
about losing scarce funding should recognize
that those who can adapt stand to receive
slices of potentially a much larger cake.
Europe should start the process of reform
now. The Commission has a responsibility to
take the lead and planning of the Eighth Framework
Programme, due to start in 2013, is already
under way. The grand challenges will not wait
until then and member states, businesses and
the scientific community must each play their
part. The first challenge is one of leadership.
Those outside Europe who might see this
discussion as parochial should consider this:
Europe will be a much more effective partner
for the United States, Asia and others if it can
speak with one voice, take the initiative and
contribute a genuine critical mass to solutions
to global problems. ■
Luke Georghiou is in the Manchester Institute
of Innovation Research at Manchester Business
School, University of Manchester, Manchester,
M15 6PB, UK. He also chairs the European
Commission’s ERA Rationales Expert Group.
1. Mustar, P. & Esterle, L. Key Figures on Science and Technology
(Observatoire des Sciences et des Techniques, Paris, 2006).
2. http://ec.europa.eu/research/era/progress-on-debate/
expert-groups-analyses_en.html
3. http://ec.europa.eu/research/era/pdf/era-greenpaper_
en.pdf
4. European Court of Auditors Evaluating the EU Research and
Technological Development (RTD) Framework Programmes
— could the Commission’s approach be improved? Special
Report No 9/2007.
5. http://ec.europa.eu/energy/res/setplan/doc/com_2007/
com_2007_0723_en.pdf
6. Larédo, P. Sci. Pub. Pol. 30, 4–12 (2003).
7. Coombs, R. & Georghiou, L. Science 296, 471 (2002).
8. http://ec.europa.eu/invest-in-research/pdf/download_
en/aho_report.pdf
“Europe will be a much
more effective research
partner if it can speak
with one voice.”
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