Streamlined funding and bottom-up opportunities key to unlocking alliances’ R&I potential

“Based on our experiences as an alliance of 11 leading universities from across Europe, we advocate for a more streamlined and strategic policy and funding approach towards supporting universities as key actors of the European Research Area in the future, following the core principles of excellence, impact and quality enhancement,” said Una Europa Senior Policy Officer, Sophia Karner. “This requires meaningful policy initiatives and dedicated funding streams at regional, national and European levels that support this strategic priority.”

Among the key actions Una Europa advocates are:

• Development of a dedicated funding instrument for strategic collaborations of universities that allows for co-investment of regional, national, and European sources and provides a long-term funding perspective across education, research, and innovation.
• Support for a true European Excellence Initiative that provides systematic and long-term support to higher education institutions in all parts of the European Research Area
• Investment in collaborative funding instruments to solve grand challenges and to incentivise bottom-up research collaboration.
• Increase association agreements for future research and innovation programmes to include more countries across the globe. We especially call for a smooth and swift association of the United Kingdom and Switzerland.

The paper also outlines lessons learned from Una.Resin, Una Europa’s flagship Horizon 2020 project, which is laying the foundations for the alliance’s common research and innovation ecosystem. Four insights surfaced by the project include the need to harness bottom-up engagement and multiple disciplinary research collaboration, embrace flexibility towards policy priorities to ensure clear added value for alliances, and build buy-in among the research community towards policy initiatives as a crucial factor in ensuring sustainability.