The interim evaluation
wishes to contribute to improving the implementation of Horizon 2020 in its
last Work Programme 2018-2020, to provide the evidence-base for the report of
the High Level Group on maximizing the impact of EU Research and Innovation
programmes and to inform the design of future Framework Programmes.
- The main finding of this evaluation is that whereas the Horizon 2020 is
meeting its objectives, it is still underfunded.
- The evaluation shows that the programme has proven to be extremely
attractive and demand to be very high. Participants to Horizon 2020 come from
over 130 different countries and more than half are newcomers. Annually, the
number of applications has increased by 65% compared to FP7, with 100,000 in total.
- However, the evaluation also shows
that this surge in demand for European funding also led to oversubscription and
a drop in success rates, with some parts of the programme strongly underfunded.
An additional EUR 60 billion would have been needed to support all the
proposals that were scored "excellent" by independent evaluations.
- Other areas for improvement
that emerge from this evaluation include the need to stimulating and scaling-up
breakthrough, market-creating innovation in particular by SMEs; and increasing
the awareness and involvement of the general public in agenda-setting.
- What the evaluation also
shows is that Horizon 2020 highlights clear European added value in terms of
economies of speed, scale and scope, producing demonstrable benefits compared
to national and regional-level support. It even showed that 83% of projects
funded would not have gone ahead without EU support.
- It is important to keep in
mind that the interim evaluation only provides an assessment of Horizon 2020
after its first three years. It is too early to talk about its final impact,
while only less than 10% of the projects finished so far.
Background:
The
interim evaluation was carried out according to the Commission’s Better Regulation
Guidelines, drawing on several external studies, independent expert groups and
extensive internal analyses. An essential input into the exercise was the
public consultation that closed in January 2017 and received close to 3500
responses and almost 300 position papers. The Commission Staff Working Document
that contains the full interim evaluation of Horizon 2020 is structured around
five criteria: coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, EU added value and
relevance.
The
interim evaluation also looks forward to future EU funding for research and
innovation. The results and lessons are meant to help the Commission to design
the final Horizon 2020 Work Programme (2018-20) and are supposed to provide the
evidence base for the report of the High
Level Group on maximising the impact of EU Research and Innovation Programmes.
Next steps
- 3rd July 2017: publication of High
Level Group report and stakeholder conference in Brussels.
- October 2017: publication of Commission communication on the interim evaluation of
Horizon 2020. This will report on the key evaluation results including from the
Art. 185 and 187 initiatives, the Commission's observations on the High-Level
Group report, and will address the recommendations of the FP7 ex-post
evaluation.
