R&I Days: Shaping the Future of Europe with 35 000 participants

Friends and colleagues, I would like to share with you my reflection on this year’s amazing edition of the R&I Days! The success of the newly fully-digital event united two key transitions: a much lower carbon footprint and a much wider audience. We welcomed 35.000 registered participants, coming from more than 120 countries, to discuss and co-create together how research and innovation will help Europe pursue a better future. And how does it look like?

Our new Framework programme was the main “star” of the Hub Horizon Europe and we reflected on many aspects this programme that will be launched in 2021:

•  Horizon Europe clusters: participants had a chance to engage in discussions with Commission officials on how best to achieve the expected impacts co-designed as part of Horizon Europe strategic planning in Horizon Europe's 6 clusters.
•  Missions: Missions play a crucial role in supporting Europe’s economic and societal transition and delivering the European Green Deal. The presentation at the R&I days of the high-level independent experts’ proposals to the Commission for the missions was a milestone, with including priorities of citizens and stakeholders. By 2030, the proposed missions aim to find solutions for saving more lives from cancer, making Europe climate resilient, restoring our ocean and waters, achieving 100 climate-neutral cities, and ensuring 75% of soils are healthy.
•  The session “The art of co-design & co-implementation of missions with citizens” under the Missions Hub reflected the Commission’s long-term commitment towards a meaningful dialogue with citizens on European policy priorities. Getting Europeans engaged in shaping a shared future vision for our continent also means strengthening of our democracy. It also highlighted that Citizens’ involvement is a pre-requisite to Missions and the European - green, societal, digital – transitions. Missions, as a test bed for citizen engagement with a possible connection to the Conference on the Future of Europe, have demonstrated that citizen voices truly can make a difference at the centre of European decision-making. The Mission Boards and the European Commission joined forces with civil society organisations to reach out to randomly selected Europeans to hear their recommendations, concerns, and hopes on the five Missions. The session reflected how citizens’ inputs shape missions design and how citizens can be further involved in achieving missions’ objectives. It is clear from the session that “citizen engagement should be continuous and ambitious, with a focus on longer-term perspective with feedback loops, and making use of the full range of possible partners.”
•  Partnerships: As Janez Poto?nik, former European Commissioner for the Environment said, “they represent a collaboration with a purpose” by pooling and mobilising resources towards common objectives. The partnerships are indeed at the heart of achieving the SDGs; reaching Europe’s goal of being the first climate-neutral continent; achieving a circular economy and pushing the digital transformation.
• Synergies: We came to a conclusion that “to get synergies, we need to start with a strategy, and financing will follow”. Synergies between EU programmes already exist, but Horizon Europe gives us excellent opportunities to extend them and build them more systematically, along with Partnerships and Missions offering great prospects. At the same time, it is essential to avoid double funding and redundant actions in the same fields.
•  The impact: We kick-started an important discussion on the Horizon projects’ climate impact since the programme needs to generate it and monitor it through granular indicators.

We also touched upon many other topics, especially the role of R&I supporting the twin transitions. Let me share with you some glimpses from these sessions:

• “Saving the planet is the best way to save the economy” was the one of the main conclusions of the All-inclusive recovery for a stronger Europe Plenary session. The panellist highlighted that “green and growth are not a contradiction” and presented 3D printing as an opportunity to “marry green and ICT technologies”.
• The main takeaway from the regulatory barriers session is that innovators and regulators need to work together to support innovation. Indeed, Sandboxes for innovative testing and cleantech solutions represent good examples of how we can join forces.
• We learned that business as usual is over due to the deep societal, ecologic and economic challenges. Now it’s time to change, protect, prepare, and transform Europe for a resilient future, with Transformative R&I policy as the key to ensure sustainability. In addition, research and innovation agenda needs to be designed and implemented “for and by the people”, including the youth.
•  We expect that strategic foresight continues rising in importance for the Commission. The potential synergies of foresight with the substantial EU R&I effort can make the Commission a model policy-maker of world-wide reputation, effectiveness and efficiency.

Finally, if these sessions provoked your interest, you can find them online. Let me thank all the participants for their contributions, the speakers for sharing their ideas with us and the colleagues from our Directorate General involved for their excellent work done. All together we made the R&I Days a true success.