This year’s SwissCore annual event explored the importance of international cooperation with the EU and trusted, like-minded partners to foster innovation.
“We have to maintain our collaboration with our trusted partners” stated Maria Cristina Russo, Deputy Director-General of DG RTD of the European Commission, in her opening remarks. This perfectly set the tone for the debate we had at our annual SwissCore event. The event was held under the title ‘Cooperate to innovate’ exploring the role and importance of international cooperation in creating innovation. We wanted to draw lessons from the 40-year-success story that is the Eureka Network in fostering innovation through bottom-up collaboration with the EU and global partners on many continents.
Does the increasingly challenging international political context influence this international cooperation for innovation from a European perspective? Ms Russo confirmed once again clearly that the EU’s approach to R&I collaboration “remains open by default” while becoming as secure as necessary. Aleksandrs Blums, Counsellor for Research and Space for Latvia, also supported this position from the Member States’ side. Joseph Moore, Counsellor for Research, Innovation and Tertiary Education for Ireland, said that the “starting point is always open” as international cooperation is vital to the success of the framework programme. And in this context, Mr Blums pointed out that the international partners of the EU are on a spectrum from very closely aligned to very distant politically, and that this is really a foreign policy matter rather than a science-policy consideration. According to him, Switzerland is the “archetype of a trusted, like-minded partner”. Nevertheless, all speakers agreed that safeguards need to be put in place to protect research security, with a tailor-made approach depending on the country in question. The Member States’ representatives made it clear in this regard that it should really be about research security first and foremost, not a protectionist approach.
The representatives of the funding agencies for innovation and research put collaboration and competition together. Thomas Werder Schläpfer, the co-director of the Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF, said that you have to collaborate to compete. Or in the words of José Moisés Martín Carretero, the Director General of CDTI: “In Europe, we need to cooperate as a market, so that our companies can compete.” Dominique Gruhl-Bégin, the CEO of Innosuisse, also put this in the context of Horizon Europe, noting that more partners in the programme, as well as more open calls, “lead to a higher level of competition” which in turn will lead to better innovation.
In contrast to many partners, Switzerland follows a very strong bottom-up approach in R&I funding, with the majority of public funding being non-prescriptive. It follows the principle of ‘researcher/innovator knows best’, or at least better than the policy makers or civil servants. Ms Gruhl-Bégin put it clearly: The agency’s role is to “give the right impulse at the right moment”, and not to accompany a company throughout the whole journey – punctual support instead of handholding. Switzerland is a real success-story of a wide bottom-up approach without industrial policy.
In the final part of the event, Eureka celebrated its 40th anniversary with the publication of their Blueprint for a better tomorrow showcasing many of the network’s most impactful cross-border collaborations, demonstrating the significance of pragmatic, trust-based cooperation platforms that link governments, funding bodies, companies, and research institutions. Switzerland took an important global role in the innovation landscape by chairing the Eureka network from July 2025 to June 2026. Founded in 1985, Eureka has evolved into the world’s largest intergovernmental network supporting international cooperation in innovation across 47 countries in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. On our work, we were pleased to hear Deputy Director-General Russo commend SwissCore for connecting Swiss actors with EU programmes.