Did you know that a €120 million research investment by the EU enabled the 3G mobile market that we know today, worth €250 billion? That is just one example of how worthwhile investment in research and innovation can be.
And so today is great news for Europe’s innovators – and Europe’s economy. The EU Commission is proposing €80 billion in funding for research and innovation over seven years. The programme – to be known as “Horizon 2020” will make it easier to seek funding, easier to bring good ideas to market, and easier for Europe to invest in innovation for the future.
Improving Europe’s investment in R&D – through better funding, and better coordination – is right at the heart of the Digital Agenda for Europe. The ICT sector, just under 5% of GDP, contributes an amazing 25% of business research and development spending. So it’s no wonder that ICT is the most important thematic area of funding of the Horizon 2020 proposal, as it is in the current FP7 programme.
There’s funding for ICT-specific developments like e-infrastructures for science, and key enabling technologies (KETs) such as micro-/nanoelectronics and photonics in order to build on Europe’s strengths and fight for future industrial leadership. And support for a new instrument first put forward in the ICT area: Flagship projects in Future and Emerging Technologies (FET): long-term support for large-scale transformative projects (up to 1bn over 10 years per flagship).
But also, ICT is also essential to tackling virtually all of the social challenges within Horizon 2020 – because whether you’re dealing with transport, health, social inclusion, energy or climate change, you can’t innovate in the modern world without using ICT.
In the past we’ve come up some great ICT innovations in Europe—often benefiting from significant EU funding. For example, the projects that underpin modern 3G and 4G mobile technology, produce new developments in energy efficient “organic LED” lighting, or design robots to help elderly people lead independent lives.
With the big step forward of Horizon 2020, we can look at a whole new range of areas that will shape our future world, and our future economy—areas like nano-electronics, creative digital content, robotics, and the infrastructure and services that will support our future internet.
So that future innovation is not just created here in Europe, but developed and brought to market here, too.
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Tags: 3G, Digital Agenda, Digital Agenda for Europe, EU funding, European Commission, FETs, FP7, Future and Emerging Technology, Horizon 2020, innovation, KET, Key Enabling Technology, Maire GEOGHEGAN-Quinn, Neelie Kroes, R&D, Research & Development, technology
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Your point about ICT radiating though all the Horizon 2020 social challenges perhaps highlights a move of ICT away from a singular discipline towards a tool that is used in almost every discipline. With every advance in technology there are benefits and risks. Fire warms our houses but it can also burn them down. A fact that limits what you can do with fire.
ICT makes analyzing at data about everything you can imagine possible in a very short time scale. This is however increasingly in conflict with ideas about privacy and protection of intellectual property. It strikes me that we don’t need policy, but rather a social cultural change in perception about the importance of data privacy and data as intellectual property.