In the media: Horizon Europe Missions – Top universities call for rethink

Laura Keustermans, Senior Policy Officer Research & Education at LERU, reacts in University World News on the European Union’s flagship Horizon Europe ‘EU Missions’. The missions were inherited from the previous European Commission with the aim of bringing research and innovation (R&I) closer to tackling key challenges facing Europe, together with regional and national authorities across the continent, and the mobilisation of citizen action.

However, their narrow scope and concentration on speedy, concrete, high-end results mean that only very few consortia of scientists can even consider addressing the EC’s expectations, said Laura Keustermans. She told University World News the Horizon Europe Missions have so far focused on the highest Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) scales, which the EC uses to indicate how close project outcomes are from commercialisation or direct use by society. This means mission objectives are so prescribed and ambitious that it not surprising there have been so few responses to the mission calls.

Keustermans said that LERU wants the EC to widen the scope and offer more funding opportunities for R&I activities and “strengthen the breakthrough character of missions by funding more disruptive research focused at lower and medium TRLs”. She also said the EC should ensure that mission goals are better known by the wider public and by researchers and suggested it could help if the commission didn’t have the missions in separate work programmes but integrated them into the ‘normal’ work programmes instead.