The EU should experiment with R&I funding

A major report on the future of the EU’s research and innovation programme calls for urgent reforms in the way the EU funds R&I, warning that the current system is no longer effective.

The report, led by former Portuguese science minister Manuel Heitor and a panel of 15 experts, urges the European Commission to experiment with new ways to fund R&I and proposes a significant increase in the R&I budget to €220 billion for the 2028-34 period to enhance European competitiveness.

The report warns that traditional EU funding mechanisms predominantly support incremental advancements, rather than fostering the groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting innovations needed to address global challenges like climate change, science denial and global conflict.

Speaking to Science|Business, James Wilsdon, RoRI’s Executive Director, said:

The science system, for all of its rhetorical promise, has failed at that downstream end to yield the kind of advances at the speed, at the quantity that perhaps had been promised, expected, hoped.

In recent years, there has been a worry that new research is less likely to diverge from traditional paths and drive science and technology in innovative directions. In response to these concerns, there’s been a surge of experimentation with novel funding approaches for research and innovation.

For example, the Volkswagen Foundation in Germany is running an experiment in Distributed Peer Review, supported by researchers at RoRI. The experiment requires grant applicants to also serve as reviewers for other proposals, aiming to ease the workload on unpaid reviewers. So far, the feedback has been positive, with hopes that this approach will ultimately result in the selection of more innovative and ambitious projects.

“There is something in the air,” said James. A dozen or more countries have launched some form of initiative into “metascience”, which, put simply, applies “scientific approaches to the management […] of the funding system.”

He added that most of these have been small-scale pilot schemes so far, but hope now is that bigger, more rigorous trials can shed light on what works.

Read the full piece in Science|Business here.