HORIZON 2020 HAS BEEN LAUNCHED
Horizon 2020 marks a new way of funding and innovation. Researchers from all across Europe are preparing to apply for funding from EU’s new framework programme for research and innovation, which was launched on December 11th.
Horizon 2020 aims at securing Europe's global competitiveness. Running from 2014 to 2020 with a budget of nearly 80 billion Euros, Horizon 2020 is part of the drive to create growth and new jobs in Europe.
Horizon 2020 is built on three pillars:
Excellent Science: Aims at strengthening EU’s position in science with a dedicated budget of €24,341 million. This pillar includes the very successful European Research Council (ERC) programmes. Compared to the Seventh Framework Programme, the ERC budget has been almost doubled. Also the well-known Marie Sk?odowska Curie actions, targeted at researchers at all career stages, are included here. Less known, but attractive, is Future and Emerging Technologies (FET). This programme promotes the exploration of radically new ideas and supports high-risk, long-term, multidisciplinary and collaborative research initiatives in ICT and complementary fields.
Industrial Leadership: Aims at strengthening industrial leadership through research and innovation actions that are based on roadmaps developed by industry. Industrial Leadership has a budget of €17,015 million. The results are expected to include major investments in key enabling technologies, as well as provide access to capital and improved support for SMEs.
Societal Challenges: Provides €30,956 million to help address major societal concerns. Such concerns include climate change, developing sustainable transport and mobility, making renewable energy more affordable, ensuring food safety and security, as well as the challenge of an ageing population. Societal Challenges focuses on policy priorities without predetermining the precise choice of technologies or solutions to be developed. The emphasis is on bringing together a critical mass of resources and knowledge across different fields, technologies and scientific disciplines, and research infrastructures to address the challenges.
Compared to Cooperation in the previous Framework Programme, calls are more broadly defined and leave it to the applicants to come up with innovative solutions, stimulating multi-disciplinary projects, including social sciences and humanities.
In general, impact will be one of the main evaluation criteria. The others being excellence and implementation.