Today, the Commission has launched the European strategy on research and technology infrastructures to enhance Europe’s management in scientific excellence and technological innovation. To stay a frontrunner within the international race for science and innovation, Europe should reinforce decisively its research and technology infrastructures and make them much more built-in and accessible to a wider vary of customers.
The strategy ensures that scientists, researchers, innovators, and trade have easy accessibility to Europe’s cutting-edge amenities, high-quality information and tailor-made companies. It additionally goals to encourage world-class researchers and innovators to ‘Choose Europe’.
From prime laboratories and pilot manufacturing strains to cutting-edge tools like particle accelerators and clear rooms, Europe’s world-class research infrastructures are the spine of Europe’s research and innovation ecosystem. They help the complete innovation cycle from frontier research to market-ready innovation, thereby bolstering Europe’s industrial competitiveness and technological sovereignty.
The strategy places ahead a set of actions in 5 areas:
1. Strengthening the European research and technology infrastructures ecosystem by growing capacities, mobilising investments and higher aligning accessible amenities and companies with person wants. The strategy additionally seeks to maximise the potential of digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Europe’s infrastructures.
2. Ensuring less complicated and higher entry to research and technology infrastructures goals to present a continuum of complementary companies for researchers and revolutionary corporations, together with startups and scaleups, throughout the EU. This will help scientific breakthroughs and enhance technology growth, testing and validation, accelerating the societal uptake and market-readiness of improvements.
3. Attracting and cultivating expertise in Europe by means of sturdy profession pathways in research and technology infrastructures, from technicians to scientific leaders. This contains supporting workers to develop new abilities and competences and attracting expertise from outdoors of Europe in step with the ‘Choose Europe’ method.
4. Improving and simplifying the governance framework for research and technology infrastructures to help long-term funding selections and align priorities among the many EU Member States and stakeholders. This contains strengthening coordination throughout funding sources and growing the influence of public funding.
5. Strengthening the worldwide dimension and resilience of research and technology infrastructures by means of cooperation with strategic companions to deal with international societal challenges. The Commission will work with Member States to promote the combination of candidate and related nations within the European Research Area. The strategy additionally addresses the danger administration for infrastructures, notably these associated to entry to essential information and amenities, fostering the EU’s sovereignty in essential applied sciences.
Background
The significance of research and technology infrastructures was emphasised in each the Draghi report on ‘The Future of EU competitiveness’ and the ‘Align, Act Accelerate’ report by the Commission Expert Group on the Interim Evaluation of Horizon Europe. These infrastructures might be key to the ‘fifth freedom’, the free motion of research, innovation and information, underpinning the complete research and innovation (R&I) ecosystem. Achieving this requires elevated funding to construct, improve and function these infrastructures to bolster EU competitiveness and management in frontier science.
The strategy hyperlinks up with and helps EU initiatives to strengthen research, innovation and competitiveness, such because the EU Startup and Scaleup Strategy, and the upcoming AI in Science Strategy, European Innovation Act, and European Research Area Act.
A large session course of contributed to the preparation of the strategy, together with a public name for proof and a number of devoted conferences and occasions.