Horizon 2020 is now a funding reality after the European Commission presented the new programme’s first call for projects. The call, worth more than €15 billion over the next two years, has been designed, says the Commission, “to help boost Europe’s knowledge-driven economy”.
This is the first time that the Commission has outlined funding priorities over a two-year period, a move designed to provide both the research and business communities with greater certainty about the EU’s policy direction.
Most of the calls for 2014 are now open and you can find all the information about them here.
The EC is making around €7.8 billion available for the 2014 calls and is focusing this injection of research funding on three key pillars of Horizon 2020. These are:
• Excellent Science: Around €3 billion is available here and this includes €1.7 billion in grants from the European Research Council for established scientists and €800 million for younger researchjers under the Marie-Curie Fellowship scheme.
• Industrial Leadership: €1.8 billion is being made available to support leadership in industry, focusing on ICT, nanotechnology, advanced manufacturing, robotics, biotechnology and space.
• Societal challenges: These challenges have been identified in broad terms as health; agriculture, maritime and the bioeconomy; energy; transport; climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials; reflective societies and security. €2.8 billion is being made available for research into these challenges in 2014 alone.
Insight Publishers, which has worked extensively with FP6 and FP7 projects over the past eight years, fully supports the new funding programme. “We are delighted that after what seems like a long process of negotiation, the fist calls have been made so quickly after the budgets were agreed,” says Insight Managing Director William Davis. “We hope this is a sign of how a more streamlined funding programme will run over the next seven years.”
About Insight
Insight is a specialist research dissemination agency and is currently dissemination work package leaders on three FP7 projects. We also coordinate another UK-funded project assessing research impact. As well as providing a suite of individual dissemination services, from building and managing the project website to providing specialist technical writing and design services for many project, we are looking to partner Horizon 2020 projects and add significantly to proposal success rates by devising bespoke dissemination strategies for our potential partners.
Please get in touch with Communications Director Sam Davis at sam@ipl.eu.com if you would like to know more about the importance of dissemination in EU projects and how we can help.
“Insight is an extremely valuable partner for the iNSPiRe project. Not only did our dissemination plan score highly with the proposal evaluators, they have created a sophisticated website, researched an invaluable target audience and user group, produced fantastic posters, brochures and other print material and have even made a film. We are only one year in to the four-year project but I already feel this intelligent and coordinated approach to dissemination is both refreshing and extremely effective. We have regular dissemination meetings and Insight has involved all the partners in this important aspect of any research project. I would highly recommend having them on board.”
Roberto Fedrizzi , EURAC and project coordinator, iNSPiRe Project.
