The High Level Group is meant to advise the Commission on how to better
support breakthrough, market-creating innovation in Horizon 2020 and future research and innovation programmes.
- The High Level Group of Innovators
brings together 15 leading personalities from Europe with a wide range
of entrepreneurial and investment expertise in business innovation.
- Changes that the Commission is
considering in some areas of Horizon 2020 include a new "bottom
up" approach to support innovation in any area as opposed to
predefining topics, a proposal evaluation system that include face to face
interviews (and not just paper proposals), and bringing together different
instruments so they are simpler to access.
- The initiative complements other
Commission efforts to help innovators stay and grow in Europe, as laid out
in the Start-Up and Scale-Up Initiative.
- The Group will build
on the results of a Call for Ideas carried out in 2016 and will feed
into the work of the High Level Group on Maximising the Impact of EU
Research and Innovation Programmes chaired by Pascal Lamy, which is due to
report by June 2017.
Background
- The Group comprises 15 highly
qualified, independent members appointed in their personal capacity
selected from 469 candidates who responded to a public call for
expressions of interest, with the aim of ensuring high-level professional
experience and a good balance in terms of skills, experience, knowledge,
geographical diversity, gender and age.
- The aim of the High Level Group is to
advise the Commission on a set of changes to be introduced in Horizon 2020
as a preparatory phase to better boost disruptive and market-creating
innovation, and address gaps in the current innovation support landscape. These
would include provision of bottom-up support targeting breakthrough
innovation projects with the potential for scaling up, in line with the
recent Commission Communication "Europe's next leaders: the Start-up
and Scale-up Initiative"(COM(2016) 733 final). The budget for actions covered
under this preparatory phase amounts to about €2.5 billion. The Group is
also meant to make recommendations for the potential remit of a European
Innovation Council concept under future EU programmes, to contribute to
generating breakthrough innovations that can create and capture new
markets.
Next steps
- The Group will hold its first meeting
in March.
More information can be found here.
