January 1st, 2021 will be the day that a new European Financial Framework Horizon Europe will commence. This new framework was developed based on reports and evaluations of Horizon 2020 .
The focus of the framework is research and innovation as it has been the case with previous ones. This time the budget is even higher, reaching the total amount of 100 billion dollars. Based on the results of relative reports, it appears that during the timeframe of Horizon Europe key novelties that have appeared will take over and lead the programme.
In particular, during the Horizon 2014-2020 framework, certain changes and innovations were made, that led to the initiation of key novelties that will support Horizon Europe. Let us give you a brief introduction to those novelties.
- European Innovation Council
Launched on October 27th, 2017 the European Innovation Council, (EIC) was created to support innovations with a breakthrough and disruptive nature. It will undertake risky investments, from a private investors’ perspective, with the aim to help innovative initiatives to scale up.
The aim of the EIC is to help innovators creating the markets of the future, leveraging private financing and scaling up their companies. The council is concentrating on innovation, ready to take risks towards the creation of a new market for new innovative products and services.
- R&I Missions
R&I missions are the key for connecting Europe’s research and innovation policies with society and citizens’ needs. As a bucket of actions, a mission has the intent of achieving bold, measurable goals that will motivate people always within a set timeframe. The impact of the mission, regarding technology and science as well as society, must be visible and it has to go beyond individual actions.
The Horizon Europe framework completely defines the mission characteristics and elements of governance. In particular, missions will be co-designed with the Member States, citizens and stakeholders. The missions will be programmed within the Global Challenges and Industrial Competitiveness pillar.
- International Cooperation
The intent of this novelty is to tackle together global and societal challenges. It should give access to the world’s best talents as well as expertise and resources. Finally, it should enhance supply and demand for new innovative solutions to problems.
Working to apply this novelty with third countries with adequate capabilities in science, technology, and innovation. In general, during Horizon Europe, new steps will be taken to generally be open to international participations. There will also be efforts to intensify targeted actions towards the desired results.
- Open Science across the programme
The aim of this novelty is to improve the dissemination and exploitation of the Research and Innovation results and support the active engagement of the society towards science.
This step will provide open access to publications once the beneficiaries will ensure the existence of all sufficient rights to comply with the open access requirement. It will also provide Mandatory Data Management Plan for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-usable) and Open Research Data.
The main idea is to support the researchers and rewarding open science systems as well as establishing the European Open Science Cloud.
- A new approach to European Partnerships
With Horizon Europe, new ideas and objectives will appear. These new ideas need a new generation of strong partnerships in order to be able to support the new EU Policies. The hey features of this novelty are the following:
- Simple architecture and toolbox
- Coherent life-cycle approaches
- Strategic orientation
These five novelties are the results of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation framework. Working towards improving Horizon Europe and making sure that new European policies will be adopted, these key point will surely help connect innovation and science with society and citizens, give free access to scientific researchand help establish new, strong partnership for the European Union.
