Activities of Anneleen VAN BOSSUYT related to 2016/2147(INI)
Plenary speeches (1)
Assessment of Horizon 2020 implementation (debate) NL
Shadow reports (1)
REPORT on the assessment of Horizon 2020 implementation in view of its interim evaluation and the Framework Programme 9 proposal PDF (808 KB) DOC (370 KB)
Amendments (31)
Amendment 5 #
Motion for a resolution
Recital B
Recital B
Amendment 14 #
Motion for a resolution
Recital D
Recital D
D. whereas the economic and financial crisis was a determining factor in the design of H2020, and new current challenges (such as populism, inequalities, migration and terrorismjob creation, security and migration) and new political and economic paradigms are likely to shape the next research programme;
Amendment 16 #
Motion for a resolution
Recital E
Recital E
E. whereas the Framework Programme (FP) must be founded on European values, scientific independence, openness, diversity, high European ethical and research integrity standards, social cohesion and equal access by citizens to the solutions and answers it provides;
Amendment 31 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 3
Paragraph 3
3. Stresses that the evaluation of FP7 and monitoring of H2020 shows that the EU FP for research is a huge success15 ; _________________ 15With over 130 000 proposals received, 9 000 grants signed, 50 000 participations and EUR 15.9 billion of EU funding.[1]; underlines that there are still many possibilities to improve the framework programme and its successor;
Amendment 34 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 4
Paragraph 4
4. Considers that among the reasons for its success are the multidisciplinary and collaborative setting and the excellence and impact requirements;
Amendment 43 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 5
Paragraph 5
5. Understands that the FP intends to incentivise industry participation in order to increase R&D spending by industry16 [1]; regrets that industries have not increased their share of R&D spending; asks the Commission to assess the added value of funding forevaluate and improve industry-driven instruments such as Joint Technology Initiatives (JTIs), which account for a large share of the budget17 [2], and the coherence and transparency of all joint initiatives18 ; _________________ 16Two-thirds of the 3% of GDP for R&D should come from industry. 17In total, the 7 JTIs account for more than EUR 7 billion of the H2020 funds, ca. 10% of the whole H2020 budget and more than 13% of the actual available funding for H2020 calls (ca. EUR 8 billion/year over 7 years). 18See Council conclusions of 29 May 2015.
Amendment 66 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 8
Paragraph 8
8. Calls on the Commission to offer a balanced mix of small, medium and large- sized projects; notes that the average budget for projects has increased under H2020 and that larger projects are more demanding regarding project management, require participants with large financial and staff capabilities; notes that this favours large institutions, creating a problem for smaller Member States and for small participants from larger Member States; regrets that this poses obstacles for newcomers and concentrates funding in elite institutions;
Amendment 80 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 10
Paragraph 10
10. Insists that research can be a risky investment for private investors and that funding research practice through grants is a necessity; regrets the tendency, in some cases, to move away from grants towards the use of loans; recognises that loans must be available for high TRL, close to market activities, within other types of instruments (e.g. EIB schemes) outside of the FP; stresses that framework programmes should never again be used to fund the European Fund for Strategic Investments or other pet projects of the European Commission;
Amendment 87 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 11
Paragraph 11
11. Underlines that several Member States are not respecting their national R&D investment commitments; calls for the earmarking of Structural Funds for R&D activities, especially investments in capacity building, infrastructure and salaries, asks that the 3% of GDP target be met, and hopes that this can be raised to 4% in the not too distant future;
Amendment 105 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 12
Paragraph 12
12. Confirms that ‘'excellence’' should remain the key criterion across the three pillars, while noting that it is only one of the three evaluation criteria, alongside ‘'impact’' and ‘'quality and efficiency of the implementation’'; calls for the reweighting of these criteria and invites the Commission to set out additional sub- criteria by adding ‘SSH integration and geographical balance’ under ‘impact’ and ‘project size’ under ‘efficiency of the implementation’invites the Commission to set out ex aequo-criteria such as SSH integration and geographical balance;
Amendment 119 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 13
Paragraph 13
13. Calls for better evaluation and quality assurance of and by the evaluators; takes note of the complaints made by unsuccessful applicants that the Evaluation Summary Reports lack depth and clarity on what should be done differently in order to succeedwas not good in the proposal;
Amendment 122 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 14
Paragraph 14
14. Call on the Commission to better define ‘'impact’'; stresses that the assessment of the impact of fundamental research projects should remain flexible and its relative weight in the evaluation procedure should be decreased; asks the Commission to check that the balance between bottom- up and top-down calls is maintained and to analyse which procedure (one or two stage) is more useful to avoid oversubscription;
Amendment 135 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 14 a (new)
Paragraph 14 a (new)
14a. Calls on the Commission to have a stricter selection after the first stage of the two stage evaluation in order to raise the success rate in the second stage;
Amendment 140 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 15
Paragraph 15
15. Calls on the Commission to continue to enhance the societal challenges approach and emphasises the importance of collaborative research; underlines the need to reinforce some societal challenges such as innovation in agriculture and health, especially cancer and antimicrobial resistance research plans;
Amendment 158 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 16
Paragraph 16
16. Notes that synergies between funds are crucial to make investments more effective; stresses that RIS3 are an important tool to catalyse synergies setting out national and regional frameworks for R&D&I investments; calls on the Commission to earmark part of ESIF for RIS3 synergies with Horizon 2020; calls on the Commission to prohibit Member States to impose stricter requirements for spending ESIF budgets than the European rules itself; calls on the Member States to renounce the introduction of stricter requirements for spending ESIF budgets than the European rules; regrets the presence of substantial barriers to making synergies fully operational19 such as the State Aid rules; calls on the Commission to revise the State Aid rules and to allow R&D structural fund projects to be justifiable within the FP rules of procedure while at the same time guaranteeing transparent procedures; _________________ 19 Large research infrastructure fits within the scope and goals of the ERDF, but ERDF funds allocated nationally cannot be used to co-finance it; construction costs associated with new research infrastructures are eligible under the ERDF, but operational and staff costs are not.
Amendment 172 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 17
Paragraph 17
17. Notes that the R&I capabilities of North/South and West/East Member States are very different; recognises the European dimension to the problem of the participation gap, which must be addressed by the FPoth at EU and national level, including through ESIF, if the EU is to exploit its full potential; welcomes, in this respect, the Widening Programme; calls on the Commission to assess whether the three Widening instruments have achieved their specific objectives and to clarify the rational and general goal of the Programme, to review the indicator used to define ‘underrepresented’ countries, and to keep a dynamic list that allows Member States to be in or out depending on how their capabilities evolve; calls on the Commission and Member States to adapt or adopt new measures with ESIF to bridge this gap;
Amendment 181 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 18
Paragraph 18
18. Recognises the importance of incorporating STEM, research and entrepreneurship skills into Member States’ primary and high schoo, secondary and tertiary level education systems in order to encourage young people to develop these skills, as R&D should be viewed in structural rather than cyclical or temporal terms; calls on the Member States and the Commission to enhance employment stability for young researchers; calls on the Commission to provide new increased levels of support for young researchers, such as a new funding scheme for early-stage researchers with less than three years of experience after PhD completion;
Amendment 213 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 20
Paragraph 20
20. Recalls that SSH integration means SSH research in interdisciplinary projects and not an ex-post add-on to otherwise technological projects, and that the most pressing problems faced by the EU require methodological research that is more conceptually focused on SSH; calls on the Commission either to introduce a minimum percentage dedicated to SSH funding, or to create an evaluation sub- criterion that takes account of its inclusion in projectsto strengthen the possibilities for SSH researchers to participate to H2020 and the next framework programme;
Amendment 219 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 21
Paragraph 21
21. Underlines that Horizon 2020 is not enough focused on the ‘'valley of death’' that constitutes the main barrier to converting prototypes into mass production, and that H2020 is the first FP to put research and innovation together; welcomnotes the creation of an EIC20 [1], but insists that this should not lead again to the separation of research from innovation; _________________ 20Commission Communication entitled ‘Europe’s next leaders: the Start-up and Scale-up Initiative’ (COM/2016/0733)., an overlap of existing initiatives such as the EIT, extra administrative burdens or a financial burden to H2020 or the 9th FP;
Amendment 231 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 22
Paragraph 22
22. Calls on the Commission to clarify the instruments and functioning of the EIC; underlines the need to keep and strengthen the SME Instrument and the Fast Track to Innovation, and to facilitate funding for the final stages of research so that laboratory scientific innovations can develop into commercial businesses; asks the Commission to analyse also how KICs and a venture capital framework can be integrated into the EIC;
Amendment 244 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 24
Paragraph 24
24. Welcomes the fact that Open Access to publications is now a general principle under Horizon 2020; highlights that the number of publications linked to projects up to December 201621 shows that new policies on enforcing the free sharing of data and ideasscholarly knowledge are required in order to make all scientific dataresearch results produced by future projects available by default, as the 100% objective is still a distant goal; _________________ 21 OpenAIRE report: In H2020, 2017 (19%) out of a total number of 10684 projects have ended and 8667 are ongoing. OpenAIRE has identified 6133 publications linked to 1375 H2020 projects.
Amendment 254 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 25
Paragraph 25
25. Welcomes the Open Science pResearch Data Pilot funding as a first step towards an Open Science Cloud; recognises the relevance of e-infrastructures and supercomputing, the need for public and private sector stakeholders and civil society to be involved and the importance of citizen science in ensuring that society plays a more active part in the definition and uptake of the problems; calls for a scientific metadata structure and procedures for the generation of such data in order to feed the European OSC and ensure data exploitation; calls on the Commission and the public and private research community to explore new models that integrate private cloud resources and public e-infrastructures and the launch of citizen agendas in science and innovation;
Amendment 265 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 26
Paragraph 26
26. Welcomes the success of H2020 and the 1:11 leverage factor; notes the oversubscription and the challenges that lie ahead, and calls for a budgetary increase of EUR 100 billion for FP9more ambitious budget for FP9 through shifts between the different headings, but without raising the overall budget;
Amendment 289 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 27
Paragraph 27
27. Calls on the Commission to separate military research from civilian research in the next MFF, since these must be two different programmes with two different budgets that do not affect the budgetary ambitions of FP9; stresses that also in the defence research programme, there needs to be a possibility for parliamentary oversight;
Amendment 303 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 28
Paragraph 28
28. Welcomes the current pillar structure of the programme, and calls on the Commission to retain this structure for the sake of continuity and predictability, to improve the interaction among all funding instruments/programmes and to study the possibility of having fewer instruments with harmonised rules; asks the Commission therefore to continue work on the coherence, simplification, transparency and clarity of the programme, on improving the evaluation process and on, reducing fragmentation, duplication, and avoiding unnecessary administrative burden;
Amendment 314 #
29. Calls on the Commission and the Member States to look for a solution to the research deficiencies facing convergence regions in some Member States, in application of the principle of additionality; regrets that financial allocations from the Structural and Investment Funds can lead to a reduction in national expenditure in regions where they apply, but insists that these must be additional to national public expenditure; calls also on the Commission and the Member States to ensure that investment in R&D is not accounted for as investment in relation to deficit objectives;
Amendment 326 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 30
Paragraph 30
30. Underlines the need for new higher excellence centres and regions and the importance of continuing to develop the ERA; calls for policion the Member States to remove barriers such as lower salaries that are faced by Eastern and Southern countries in order to avoid brain drain, and for the excellence of the project to be prioritised over the excellence of ‘'elite’' centres;
Amendment 336 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 31
Paragraph 31
31. Notes that R&D investment by industry has not significantly increased; in viewcalls ofn the generally scarce resources for public R&;D spending, calls for industrial competitiveness to be supported by differentiating between mature and emerging sectors, thus allowing larger or more mature industries to participate in projects more at their own cost or through loansCommission to act as a facilitator to allow industries to participate in projects more at their own cost or through loans; calls on the Commission to make an impact assessment of lower funding rates for private partners in the second and third pillar of the framework programme in order to fund more projects with the same budget;
Amendment 359 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 32
Paragraph 32
32. Regrets the mixed set of results achieved by the gender equality focus in H2020, as the only target reached is the share of women in the advisory groups, while the share of women in the project evaluation panels and among project coordinators, and the gender dimension in research and innovation content, remain below target levels; encourages Member States to create a gender-positive legal and political environment and to provide incentives for change, and calls on the Commission to continue to promote gender equality and mainstreaming in FP9 and to consider the possibility of gender as a sub- criterion in the evaluation phase;
Amendment 364 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 32 a (new)
Paragraph 32 a (new)
32a. Calls on the Commission to further reduce administrative burdens for applicants in order to be an even more open research programme, calls on the Commission to base the audit system on the basis of trust and to recognise national certified auditing rules;
Amendment 366 #
Motion for a resolution
Paragraph 32 b (new)
Paragraph 32 b (new)
32b. Calls on the Commission to publish a good mix between open and more descriptive calls leading to the project proposals with breakthrough and disruptive proposals while ate the same time tackling the most pressing concrete societal challenges;