2.3.2013   

EN

Official Journal of the European Union

C 62/14

—

welcomes the European Commission's initiative, in response to the Council's request, to provide a framework to boost efforts towards the completion of the European Research Area by 2014;

—

shares the view that knowledge is the currency of the new economy. It therefore agrees that a world-class research and innovation capacity, relying on a strong public science base, is crucial to achieve lasting economic recovery and to secure Europe's position as a global player;

—

stresses that the completion of the ERA is needed in order to overcome the fragmentation of research in Europe along with national and institutional barriers. Undoubtedly, this fragmentation prevents Europe from fulfilling its research and innovation potential, at a huge cost to Europeans as taxpayers, consumers, and citizens. In this regard, there is now a need for more and targeted actions;

—

calls on the Commission to promote inter-regional cooperation within Horizon 2020 by developing effective tools and incentives. Within this context, local governments and regional authorities could play a supporting and coordinating role (setting up research and innovation networks, providing technical and administrative support and incentives for funding from the private sector), with a view to promoting research and making use of the results of knowledge and innovation.

Rapporteur

Grigorios ZAFEIROPOULOS (EL/EPP), Councillor of the Region of Attica

Reference document

Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: A Reinforced European Research Area Partnership for Excellence and Growth

COM(2012) 392 final

1.

welcomes the European Commission's initiative, in response to the Council's request, to provide a framework to boost efforts towards the completion of the European Research Area by 2014;

2.

agrees with the European Council's conclusions of February 2011 and March 2012 to the effect that there is a pressing need for completing the ERA by 2014;

3.

appreciates that legislation to complete the ERA might be considered useful for partial areas (e.g. coordination of national and EU policies under Article 181 TFEU and promoting actions to disseminate research results under Article 180, in conjunction with Article 182.5 TFEU);

4.

considers that, in the context of the current economic crisis, the completion of a European Research Area focussing on research and research-based innovation is fundamental to supporting economic growth, jobs, scientific excellence and cohesion amongst regions and countries;

5.

shares the view that knowledge is the currency of the new economy. It therefore agrees that a world-class research and innovation capacity, relying on a strong public science base, is crucial to achieve lasting economic recovery and to secure Europe's position as a global player;

6.

underlines that both the implementation of Horizon 2020 and the ERA need to give more focus and impact on real-life practices (1), i.e. the local and regional levels need to engage themselves and be fully involved to reach the Europe 2020 strategy targets;

7.

stresses that the ERA will improve our lives by making Europe a place in which scientific research, technological development and innovation thrive and address the major challenges of our times, and believes that cooperation between academia, business and public authorities should be stepped up to promote knowledge-based value creation;

8.

agrees that all regions' potential for excellence needs to be harnessed and that new approaches are necessary in order to help underperforming regions and Member States to achieve excellence and smart regional specialisation;

9.

stresses that the completion of the ERA is needed in order to overcome the fragmentation of research in Europe along with national and institutional barriers. Undoubtedly, this fragmentation prevents Europe from fulfilling its research and innovation potential, at a huge cost to Europeans as taxpayers, consumers, and citizens. In this regard, there is now a need for more and targeted actions;

10.

agrees that measures should be aimed at increasing competition amongst researchers and research organisations and exploiting cross-border synergies between national and regional research systems, facilitating researcher careers as well as mobility and the free circulation of knowledge;

11.

believes strongly that one of the ERA's key aims should be to reduce brain drain, particularly from regions lagging behind in research, as well as the wide regional disparities in research and innovation performance, aiming at excellence throughout Europe that takes innovation potential into account. It is important here that the European research and innovation agenda should dovetail with national and regional innovation strategies;

12.

welcomes the European Council's objective of improving the conditions for research and development and bringing combined public and private R&D investment to 3 % of EU GDP. It must be recognised, though, that Europe still lags behind in the marketing of excellence compared with other parts of the world, and the role of SMEs in driving innovation cannot therefore be overstated;

13.

believes that cohesion instruments could strengthen the development of excellence and capacity-building by boosting research and innovation policies at regional level. This will allow a stairway to excellence to be developed, enabling these regions to participate fully in the ERA and benefit from the funding sources of the Common Strategic Framework;

14.

calls on the Commission, together with the Council and Parliament, to ensure the effective and efficient implementation of Horizon 2020 by providing rules and procedures which are as simple as possible for beneficiaries;

15.

acknowledges that the ERA priorities set out in the Communication are well defined and their full implementation would improve Europe's research performance and effectiveness by 2014. However, there should be full and energetic involvement in the reinforced partnership by the Member States, research stakeholders and their European organisations, as well as the Commission, in order to ensure that the completion of the ERA will bring Europe's excellence to the fore by fostering efficiency, quality and new opportunities based on the Union's needs;

16.

calls on the European Commission to ensure synergies and complementarities between Horizon 2020 and the Structural Funds and to build stairways to excellence for the less well-performing Member States and regions that are more vulnerable from economic and social points of view, on the basis of their strengths, with a view to increasing substantially their research and innovation capacity and closing Europe's innovation divide;

17.

calls on the Commission to promote inter-regional cooperation within Horizon 2020 by developing effective tools and incentives. Within this context, local governments and regional authorities could play a supporting and coordinating role (setting up research and innovation networks, providing technical and administrative support and incentives for funding from the private sector), with a view to promoting research and making use of the results of knowledge and innovation;

18.

stresses that regions themselves need to increase their preparedness to benefit from research. The developed competences, practices and tools should then be used to leverage the research results to the European-wide use. This can only be accomplished by intensifying synergies in using all European funding instruments, such as Horizon 2020, cohesion policy as well as national, regional and local resources (2). The joint usage of resources is, however, not sufficient, but in addition requires changes in the operating culture and administrative practices;

19.

urges local and regional authorities to boost cooperation between European and/or regional and national organisations to promote research and innovation, and to introduce improvements facilitating convergence between policies, the efficiency and effectiveness of management, and harmonisation of procedures strengthening common management systems that facilitate public access to policies and increase their socio-economic impact;

20.

believes that local and regional authorities can and should play an important role in the development of innovative products and services, through the promotion of public-private partnerships. This will aim at creating more jobs and growth at a local and/or regional level and at the same time will improve the operational capacity and efficiency of the public and private sector;

21.

welcomes the initiatives of DG-R&I and DG-REGIO facilitating the setting-up of regional research and innovation networks which could be supported by universities, institutions, public authorities and the private sector;

22.

notes that, since 2000, the Commission and the Member States have progressed together towards an ERA, but stresses that this progress has been uneven across the different ERA dimensions and Member States;

23.

encourages the involvement of regional and research stakeholder organisations within the ERA, where appropriate;

24.

highlights the important role of the public sector in general, and in particular the role played by local and regional authorities in bringing businesses, university/research institutes and public institutions together (in accordance with the triple helix method), with a view to developing and implementing the ERA and notes that insufficient consideration has been given to the role of the public sector in the Commission's communication;

25.

calls on the Commission, the Member States and research stakeholders to set and implement the appropriate conditions for improving the effectiveness of Europe's research systems, addressing key issues such as transnational cooperation and competition, the labour market for researchers, gender equality and the transfer of scientific knowledge. The ‧conditions‧ set by the Commission appear sufficient to meet the targets;

26.

acknowledges that the insufficient competition within national research systems does not create the right conditions for improving scientific quality. In this regard, limited competition amongst research institutions and universities leads to insufficient specialisation;

27.

believes that improving Europe's fundamental, curiosity-driven research performance is imperative for the innovations and breakthroughs needed to address the grand challenges. Europe must make well-focussed and strategic investments in basic research, with scientific excellence as the leading criterion for decisions, which will create the conditions for the establishment and sustainable development of local and regional skills and knowledge potential;

28.

agrees that Member States and regions should support competitive funding through calls for proposals and institutional peer review as one of the main methods for allocating national and regional funds for research and innovation; in some cases, however, peer review is not necessary when it comes to the distribution of funds to regional bodies for research, development and innovation;

29.

welcomes the objective put forward in the Green Paper (published by the Commission on 2011) of finding an appropriate balance between institutional and competitive funding. In line with the views it has expressed previously, the Committee of the Regions calls for the debate on the appropriate balance between institutional and competitive funding to continue. How this balance is struck is very important to the dynamics of the system and the viability of the different research institutions;

30.

believes that boosting the share of core funding and smart specialisation allow funding to also reach small, viable research communities. Alongside large units and top-down major technology programmes providing critical mass, a small teaching and research community focused on a single discipline can also generate considerable competitiveness and innovation when it cooperates and networks effectively as part of a campus and a multidisciplinary chain of universities and research institutes in its hometown and internationally;

31.

maintains that core funding for research institutes must be stepped up. For this reason, the Committee encourages the Commission and the Member States to take this on board and frame a research infrastructure funding model that also takes into account the complementarity of the Structural Funds. For research communities, stronger core funding represents an opportunity to launch bottom-up research projects based on their own strategic needs while interacting in a dynamic way with the region and city where they are based;

32.

stresses that scientific excellence as the leading selection criterion and the international peer review core principles should be applied in the allocation of funds for research and innovation activities;

33.

recognises that research and innovation models that are successful in one region cannot simply be copied and transferred to other regions. However, if proper account is taken of the respective structural, social and cultural circumstances, they can serve as examples for the development of appropriate models in other regions, including less well-performing regions;

34.

reaffirms its support for the coordination of regional, national and EU research programmes and priorities, emphasises the responsibility of Member States and regional and local authorities for research and innovation and continues to reject centralised research agendas and priorities at European level;

35.

invites the Commission to promote mutual learning and exchange of good practice and experiences between Member States and stakeholder organisations on the removal of national legal and/or other barriers to the ERA for the priorities set out in the Communication. Common guidelines on science policy for the entire EU should also be promoted, so as to foster and facilitate common actions;

36.

calls on the Commission to support Member States and regions in using Structural Funds to develop research capacity, as well as tailored innovation strategies that are based on regional competences and smart specialisation strategies, including support for joint research programmes, in line with cohesion policy objectives;

37.

recognises, in this regard, the importance of identifying the most promising fields of comparative advantage as a basis for defining smart regional specialisation strategies (3). The EU should encourage regions to become innovative pioneers in their chosen fields and to network and cooperate with other regions. Cautions against any attempt to use smart specialisation as a way of prioritising already leading regions or local authorities while leaving other areas not or under-supported. A European map showing regions according to their level of innovation and field of specialisation is thus needed. This mapping can then be used to encourage cooperation between regions and to establish specific support instruments for the lagging regions through the provision of ad hoc funds to help them catch up with the most innovative regions;

38.

agrees on the need for a more precise system of indicators and objectives that measures not only the percentage that businesses invest in R&D, but also aspects related to increasing competitiveness and productivity. In other words, a comprehensive system that measures the effectiveness of R&D systems and the productivity of innovation (4);

39.

stresses that the EU needs to act urgently and coherently in order to achieve the scale of effort and impact needed to address the grand challenges with the limited public research funds available;

40.

reaffirms its belief that better coordination and cooperation between Member States and regions, and also amongst themselves, may create synergies and thus added value for the ERA. European Groupings of Territorial Cooperation (EGTCs) are a valuable instrument for successfully implementing territorial cooperation, including in the field of research and innovation. This will strengthen Europe's competitiveness on the worldwide knowledge market;

41.

underlines that attention to the production, dissemination and use of knowledge should be effectively channelled by taking into account strategic interests of public and private stakeholders and involving them in the drawing up of strategic agendas. This requires the support of international networking so that the best researchers can engage with one another in developing responses to the grand challenges;

42.

stresses the need for better coordination and synergy between local, regional, national and European cross-border research and innovation strategies, respecting the specific characteristics of the different contexts and increasing the possibilities for complementarities and cooperation between them;

43.

reaffirms the view that greater coordination between research and industry is required so that the regions can make progress in smart specialisation in the field of key enabling technologies (such as nanotechnology, micro and nanoelectronics, industrial biotechnology, photonics, advanced materials and advanced manufacturing technologies) and so that trans-national networks can be promoted and cooperation strengthened at regional, national and European level (5), which would also facilitate the creation of stable and highly skilled jobs;

44.

agrees that Member States and regions should promote and implement joint research agendas addressing grand challenges, exchanging information and good practices in agreed priority areas, and should ensure that adequate national and regional funding is committed and strategically aligned in these areas;

45.

believes that legal and bureaucratic barriers to the cross-border interoperability of national and international programmes should be removed, in order to allow joint financing of research projects and research infrastructures at national or regional level or international level;

46.

invites the Commission to provide Member States, regions and research funding organisations with efficient and effective support in implementing joint international peer review evaluations and setting common funding standards;

47.

highlights that excellent research is based on world-class facilities and research infrastructures (RIs), including e-infrastructures. Such RIs are very important for Europe, because they can attract talent and stimulate innovation and business opportunities while contributing to job creation;

48.

appreciates the key role of RIs in knowledge-based innovation systems; welcomes in this respect the new concept of Regional Partner Facilities (RPFs) and partnership between research infrastructures, and acknowledges their potential to contribute to a more balanced development of the European Research Area by engaging smaller or less experienced countries and regions in competitive research and innovation performance (6);

49.

believes that effective measures should be taken to steer Horizon 2020 towards the reforms Europe needs. Of key importance here is the Societal Challenges pillar, where the emphasis should be on combining the best European expertise with large-scale co-creation projects, allowing Europe to implement broad system-level structural reforms across traditional boundaries. Discipline-centred research alone will not create the knowledge needed to solve major societal challenges. The focus should be directly on multidisciplinary RDI activities that yield concepts and components needed in those system-level structural reforms. At the core of research lie experimentation and piloting. A good example is the extensive Smart City operating field. An essential part of all this is scalability of results in the different conditions of Europe's regions (7);

50.

supports the Innovation Union commitment that Member States together with the European Commission should have completed or launched by 2015 the construction of 60 % of the priority European infrastructures currently identified by the Roadmap of the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI);

51.

recommends that Member States should secure financial commitments for the construction and operation of ESFRI RIs and promote the development of RPFs, particularly in the development of national roadmaps and the Operational Programmes for the next programming period;

52.

invites the Commission to provide effective support, through Horizon 2020, for access to RIs, as well as the ongoing overall integration of pan-European interest RIs, and not just those awarded European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) status;

53.

suggests that the Commission should possibly supportthe operational costs of RIs through funding sources, such as Structural Funds;

54.

calls for national and regional authorities to link RI roadmaps to the ESFRI roadmap and smart specialisation strategies in research and innovation programmes co-financed by Structural Funds, reinforcing the capacity of less-favoured regions to host and participate in RIs of pan-European and international interest;

55.

considers that the European Commission should work together with ESFRI to set priorities for implementing the Roadmap and to provide advice and guidance to Member States on overcoming legal, financial or technical obstacles to implementation;

56.

acknowledges that barriers among the different national labour markets for researchers are mainly caused by different approaches to recruitment, institutional autonomy, diverging approaches to the design of human resource strategies and in to the promotion of research mobility, and by unattractive working conditions for young and non-EU researchers;

57.

recalls that thousands of workers in the Member States have already lost their jobs over the course of the ongoing economic crisis (8), even highly-skilled researchers mainly from R&D departments in the industrial sector; the emergence of new markets and the relocation of businesses to countries where manufacturing costs are lower will further exacerbate this problem. It is absolutely vital for all jobs skills to be upgraded and matched to labour market requirements (9);

58.

believes that it is crucial to remove legal and other barriers to the application of open, transparent and merit-based recruitment of researchers and to cross-border access to and portability of national grants;

59.

agrees that research organisations should advertise all vacancies using the common profiles established in the European Framework for Research Careers and fill research posts according to open and transparent procedures, including non-EU nationals. They should also advertise posts via the EurAxess portal (http://ec.europa.eu/euraxess/index.cfm/lobs/index);

60.

underlines that there should be specific focus on the mobility of researchers in Europe and calls for the application of concrete measures to remove the barriers to mobility (such as pension rights portability and a guarantee of social protection, mutual recognition of professional qualifications and measures to reconcile family and work life) that will facilitate the mobility of European researchers and make the prospect of a research career in the EU more attractive;

61.

welcomes the Commission's initiatives to address social security barriers for researchers in the EU and further facilitate the entry of third-country researchers;

62.

reaffirms the need to attract excellent researchers from outside Europe and therefore emphasises the importance of EU mobility programmes such as the Marie Curie programme and measures taken or to be launched in some regions to support returning researchers and scientists;

63.

encourages local and regional authorities to take measures that can contribute to improving mobility in all areas, in particular between academia and industry. Close pan-European cooperation among academia, business and research organisations, involving key political players and administrations at local, regional and national level in the form of the triple helix model, is very important;

64.

stresses the need to encourage young people to seek a professional career in research and innovation activities, support young entrepreneurs who contribute to research, development and innovation activities and make use of their results in their local or regional communities;

65.

underlines the urgent need to ensure that there are well-trained people with the skills required to work in the knowledge industry, and that the industry is an attractive place to work, given the difficulties in filling posts in strategic areas for the future, such as research and science, engineering, health, and mathematics (10). The skills and knowledge of workers should be updated on an ongoing basis, and training should focus on the needs of new sectors and new technologies, not just in the interests of the industry, but also to help workers who lose their jobs to adapt quickly to new sectors and technologies;

66.

stresses the need to ensure not just the promotion of excellence and high achievement, but also good education and training for people in every region, as the foundation for individual and collective prosperity and for the ability of regions to innovate (11);

67.

recommends that the European Commission set up an online portal for the exchange of best practice examples at local and regional level on integrating young people into the labour market (12), including in the research and innovation sectors;

68.

acknowledges the limited progress on gender equality so far, and notes that only a number of Member States and research organisations implement policies to benefit from the talent of female scientists and from the inclusion of a gender dimension in research content. The integration of a gender dimension into the design, evaluation and implementation of research still appears to be limited;

69.

stresses the need to remove the barriers to the recruitment, retention and career progression of female researchers, to address gender imbalances and to promote the gender dimension in research programmes;

70.

agrees that, within Horizon 2020, the gender dimension should be integrated into all programmes and projects from their inception;

71.

welcomes the Commission's initiative to propose a ‧Recommendation to Member States‧ in 2013, with common guidelines on institutional change to promote gender equality in universities and research institutions;

72.

suggests that the Commission set up a cross-cutting committee to monitor and advise on the representation of female researchers in ERA and Horizon 2020 activities;

73.

notes that Member States show differing degrees of advancement in terms of supporting open access policies that could help to reduce information asymmetries. Furthermore, knowledge transfer between public research institutions and the private sector is still insufficient and this has an impact on scientific quality and R&D-derived economic outcomes;

74.

stresses that access to and transfer of knowledge across and between research institutes, universities and industry play a pivotal role in fundamental research and innovation, and should be strongly encouraged;

75.

underlines that the open access approach to the results and data from publicly funded research is an essential building block in the construction of the European Research Area, with a view to ensuring that researchers can build on existing knowledge, assess new findings and avoid duplicating research efforts;

76.

emphasises the importance of coordinating and harmonising policies on access to and preservation of scientific information, while ensuring that public research fosters knowledge transfer between public and private sectors through national strategies;

77.

highlights the need for optimal interaction, links and strategic partnering between academia and industry and for the drawing up of joint collaborative research agendas in order to maximise the use of research results and their impact in terms of innovation and addressing the grand challenges;

78.

agrees that open access to scientific publications should be established as a general principle for all EU-funded projects under Horizon 2020 and that the Commission should continue to fund projects related to open access; it must be ensured, however, that full account is taken of the views of scientists and businesses regarding intellectual property and user rights;

79.

proposes the launch of activities to raise stakeholder awareness regarding open access and e-Science. The Commission, in close cooperation with stakeholders, should work to develop model consortium agreements in order to enhance knowledge transfer;

80.

underlines that Member States and regions must carry out the necessary national and regional reforms and put in place the conditions needed to complete the ERA. They must also support the implementation of these reforms by facilitating actions which are the responsibility of organisations funding and performing research;

81.

suggests the development of networks of triple helix partnerships within regions that can work together to coordinate actions and underlines the importance of exchange of best practices, including on smart specialisation strategies, through the introduction of ERA Chairs into regional research and innovation systems and support for international networks linked to identified regional competences;

82.

stresses the need to monitor and evaluate progress in the implementation of the ERA actions identified in the Communication, by Member States, the Commission and research stakeholders. Welcomes, in this regard, the development by the Commission of the announced ERA monitoring mechanisms; calls on the Commission to ensure that the process of developing the announced ERA monitoring mechanism and selecting the indicators is transparent, involving the Member States. The choice and number of indicators should be kept to the necessary minimum for assessing progress on the completion of the ERA. Established procedures for cooperation with Eurostat, the national statistical agencies and local authorities (e.g. ministries) should be used for data selection from research organisations and academia;

83.

welcomes efforts at simplifying procedures, as well as the publication of the ‧Practical Guide‧ to EU funding opportunities (13); particularly appreciates ongoing efforts towards allowing different programmes to finance different phases of projects in an ongoing perspective; would welcome the development of this Practical Guide into a comprehensive yet accessible digital gateway to information and resources on relevant research and innovation programmes (14);

84.

calls on the Commission to ensure that Horizon 2020 will help to consolidate the completion and functioning of the ERA, supporting actions related to researcher careers and mobility, research infrastructures, gender, cross-border cooperation, open access and knowledge transfer;

85.

welcomes the Commission's intention that, from 2014, a full assessment of progress should be transmitted to the Council and the European Parliament on annual basis;

86.

requests that the European Commission to transmit the ERA Progress Report to the Committee of the Regions.