After a two-year break, the SwissCore R&I Seminar was finally able to gather Swiss R&I Stakeholders in Brussels again – and to give them insights into the latest EU developments.
The COVID-19 pandemic seems finally over, and on-site events are flourishing again in Brussels. Among them the annual SwissCore R&I seminar, this year starting with a dive into the overview on political developments in research and innovation (R&I) policy at the EU level, in Switzerland, and – in particular – also covering the Swiss-EU R&I relations.
This introduction was followed by a programme of 15 speakers from the European Commission, the executive agencies, and the wider Brussels bubble. Even if Switzerland is still not associated to Horizon Europe and right now it is not possible to anticipate when this could happen, the future of the framework programme was met with big interest, regardless if it was about the ongoing efforts at EU level to create a New European Research Area, R&I priorities coming up with Sweden’s Council Presidency or the processes preparing the next strategic plan 2025-2027 for Horizon Europe. Subjects imprinting almost all the presentations and discussions were the possibilities created by synergies between different parts of Horizon Europe, and the importance of the ongoing comprehensive evaluation of Horizon 2020, and the mid-term evaluation of Horizon Europe. One participant put into words the importance of the latter endeavour: “The future of the framework programme is happening now – it is shaped by our contributions to the public consultation for the evaluation.”
While going into more and more detail of the instruments of Horizon Europe during sessions on the ERC, MSCA or the European Partnerships, especially with a retrospective, it became clear, that Switzerland and Swiss researchers were and are important contributors to the European research and innovation landscape. Despite the status of Switzerland and therefore the exclusion from all mono-beneficiary calls of the European Research Council (ERC), the participation in MSCA or collaborative projects didn’t drop as much as it was feared. One reason for this is, that Swiss entities can still participate in most collaborative projects under Horizon Europe (see www.horizon-europe.ch for more information).
In the following parallel sessions covering either the broad bandwidth of digital and innovation topics or health, European Green Deal topics and the Mission approach, the participants were free to choose what interested them most. Session one included the Chips Act, which will also have an effect on the partnership landscape under Horizon Europe, because it foresees to transform the current Key Digital Technologies Joint Undertaking (KDT JU) to the Chips JU. It continued with the HEI initiative of the EIT bringing closer together Higher Education Institutions and innovation as well as innovation ecosystems and space and defence research, which is of special importance regarding the war in Ukraine. Parallel session two covered current developments of the European Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA) as well as the European Health Data Space. Moreover, the European Commission’s priority of the European Green Deal and how it is implemented throughout Horizon Europe and the European Missions, which were only introduced with the current framework programme, were part of the second parallel session.
The much-appreciated breaks between the information-packed sessions, but also the traditional Euresearch-SwissCore dinner, were perfect to be dedicated to one of the core missions of the R&I seminar – networking – undoubtedly one of the great benefits of getting together again in person.
Furthermore, the Euresearch workshop on the last day featured four additional speakers who placed a special focus on the practicalities and nitty gritty details of project proposals, admission, funding and organisation. Options and possibilities of the European Innovation Council (EIC) Pathfinder and Transition instruments or the collaborative projects of Horizon Europe’s Cluster 6 ‘Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment’ were presented and discussed. But also overarching topics important for a diversity of instruments and areas like the eligibility of associated countries, blind evaluation processes, gender balance plans, lump sums or the reform of the research assessment in the frame of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) received the participants’ attention.