The initiative comes from INPACT!, a network launched in 2023 that brings together scientist-innovators, mainly grantees of the European Research Council, who have first-hand experience of trying to move fundamental discoveries toward application. The authors combined this direct experience with economic analysis of European funding programmes to identify reforms that could strengthen Europe’s ability to translate research into innovation. Among the contributors are researchers from several Italian institutions, including the Italian Institute of Technology, IMT Lucca, Politecnico di Torino, Politecnico di Milano and Università Bocconi. Gianni Ciofani, co-author of the Policy Forum and coordinator of the Italian Institute of Technology’s Center for Materials Interfaces in Pontedera, is a recipient of multiple European Research Council grants and represents the profile of researcher the paper seeks to empower.

The analysis centres on Horizon Europe, the European Union’s research and innovation programme covering 2021 to 2027. According to the authors, funding within this framework remains fragmented, and discoveries with commercial potential can fall into administrative gaps between two key instruments. European Research Council Proof of Concept grants help researchers explore practical applications of frontier science, while European Innovation Council programmes support technology development and business growth. Between these two stages, promising ideas can lose momentum because the transition requires repeated evaluations, new application procedures and shifts in governance that are difficult for individual researchers and early-stage investors to navigate.

The paper’s flagship proposal is to bring the ERC Proof of Concept grants under European Innovation Council governance, creating a more continuous pathway from scientific discovery to technology development and commercialisation. The authors argue that this restructuring could reduce repeated evaluations, simplify transitions between programmes and make support more predictable for researchers and the investors who back them. Dario Polli, professor at Politecnico di Milano and one of the lead authors of the Policy Forum, frames the problem in terms of lost momentum. Europe, he says, has extraordinary scientific talent, but too often momentum is lost between discovery and application, and what is needed is a more continuous pathway that allows promising ideas to move from fundamental research towards technologies, companies and solutions capable of generating economic and societal impact.

Beyond connecting existing programmes, the Policy Forum calls for substantially stronger support for early-stage, high-risk innovation. The combined annual funding for the European Innovation Council’s Pathfinder and Transition programmes currently stands at approximately 500 million euros, a figure the authors consider modest given the scale of the challenge, while their programme-management capacity remains limited compared with advanced research agencies in the United States. The recommendation is to reallocate resources towards breakthrough innovation and to give independent programme managers greater authority to guide promising projects, an approach inspired by models such as the United States’ ARPA-style agencies, where empowered managers can steer portfolios of risky ideas with flexibility and speed that conventional grant systems rarely allow.

Giorgio Presidente, a researcher at the Institute for European Policymaking at Bocconi University, places the funding critique in a wider economic context. Europe, he argues, is caught in a middle-technology trap: the continent specialises in mature industries such as automotive and industrial machinery, while frontier sectors such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology remain too small. To strengthen competitiveness and strategic autonomy, he contends, Europe must rebuild the pipeline from scientific discovery to market, funding the best ideas and enabling researchers and innovators to turn today’s breakthroughs into tomorrow’s high-tech industries. This framing connects the paper’s technical recommendations on grant governance to the broader political debate about Europe’s productivity and technological sovereignty.

The authors also target the administrative burden of applying for European funding. They propose that applications be shorter and assessed more directly on the substance of the idea and its potential use, rather than on extensive documentation that consumes researchers’ time without improving selection quality. In a further measure aimed at the gap between excellence and capacity, they suggest that national funding agencies make multi-year commitments to support excellent projects that successfully pass European evaluation but cannot be financed from the available European Union budget. This would extend an approach already used through the Seal of Excellence, a quality label that allows national and regional programmes to identify and fund proposals judged excellent at the European level but left unfunded due to budget limits.

A recurring theme of the paper is that Europe does not have a problem with the quality of its research; what it lacks are the conditions for that research to translate more readily into innovation and value for society. The authors argue that supporting researchers should extend beyond generating new knowledge to protecting, developing and transferring it, and that entrepreneurship and technology transfer should be recognised as fully legitimate components of the scientific mission. Ciofani emphasises the institutional dimension of this shift, noting that universities face an opportunity to rethink incentives, skills and career paths, creating an environment in which researchers who choose to turn a discovery into a technology or a new venture are supported rather than penalised in their academic careers.

Reforming European funding alone, the authors stress, will not be sufficient. Universities and technology transfer offices must also create conditions in which researchers can pursue innovation without being forced to choose between an academic career and entrepreneurship. The Policy Forum recommends greater recognition of entrepreneurship in academic careers, improved intellectual-property management and clearer routes to patents, industrial partnerships and spin-offs, together with better access to mentoring and entrepreneurial expertise. These measures address a well-documented cultural problem in European academia, where commercialisation activities have often counted little in hiring, promotion and evaluation, discouraging precisely the researchers best placed to translate frontier science into applications.

The authors are careful to note the limits of their proposals. The reforms would not by themselves resolve Europe’s wider constraints in venture capital, regulation and business expansion, all of which shape whether young companies can scale within the European market. However, they argue that a more coherent system linking scientific research, technology development and entrepreneurship could help Europe capture more of the economic and societal value generated by its research base. Amanda Silva Brun, director of research at the CNRS in France and one of the lead authors, describes the practical vision: clearer institutional pathways with well-defined steps, predictable timelines and streamlined procedures that make the entire process easier to navigate, empowering more researchers to transform knowledge into solutions for society. Embracing innovation, she suggests, can give new momentum to scientific careers, reshape how research is approached and enable scientists to play a strategic role in strengthening Europe’s global competitiveness while addressing unmet societal needs. The Policy Forum, which underwent external peer review and revision before acceptance in Science, is intended as a contribution to ongoing discussions about the design of the next generation of European research and innovation programmes, and its authors hope the perspective of scientists who have themselves attempted the journey from discovery to market will inform how those programmes are built.

Subject of Research: Proposed reforms to European Union research and innovation funding to improve commercialisation of scientific discoveries

Article Title: European researchers set out EU innovation reforms in Science

Article References: European researchers set out EU innovation reforms in Science. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: European Union, Horizon Europe, European Research Council, European Innovation Council, science policy, innovation, technology transfer, academic entrepreneurship, research funding, spin-offs, competitiveness, INPACT!

The initiative is grounded in the direct experience of researchers who have themselves tried to carry discoveries out of the laboratory, most of them grantees of the European Research Council, combined with economic analysis of European funding programmes. The authors’ central diagnosis is fragmentation. Europe does not lack talent or ideas, they argue; it lacks a continuous route from fundamental research to commercialisation. Instead, promising discoveries encounter administrative gaps and repeated evaluation cycles as they move between instruments designed for different stages of maturity, losing momentum, teams and investors along the way.

The analysis concentrates on Horizon Europe, the European Union’s research and innovation programme for 2021 to 2027, and on the handoff between two of its flagship components. The European Research Council’s Proof of Concept grants help researchers explore practical applications of frontier science, while the European Innovation Council supports technology development and business growth. Between these two poles, the authors contend, commercially promising projects can fall into a gap: funding remains fragmented, procedures differ, and researchers must navigate repeated assessments of the same idea at each transition. Their headline proposal is structural. Moving the ERC Proof of Concept scheme under the governance of the European Innovation Council would create a single, more continuous pathway from discovery to technology development and commercialisation, reducing duplicated evaluations, simplifying transitions between programmes and making support more predictable for researchers and the investors who back them.

“Europe has extraordinary scientific talent, but too often we lose momentum between discovery and application,” says Dario Polli, Professor at Politecnico di Milano and one of the lead authors of the Policy Forum. “We need a more continuous pathway that allows promising ideas to move from fundamental research towards technologies, companies and solutions capable of generating economic and societal impact.” The point, the authors emphasise, is not to redirect money away from basic research, which they regard as the foundation of the entire innovation chain, but to ensure that when fundamental results show commercial promise, the system does not force them to stall at the boundary between funding instruments.

The second pillar of the proposal addresses early-stage, high-risk innovation, where the authors argue Europe is systematically under-resourced. Combined annual funding for the European Innovation Council’s Pathfinder and Transition programmes currently stands at approximately 500 million euros, a figure the paper contrasts with the far larger programme-management capacity of advanced research agencies in the United States. Beyond the raw budget, the authors highlight a difference in philosophy: agencies such as ARPA-H and the legacy of ARPA-E empower independent programme managers with the authority and resources to identify promising projects and steer them aggressively through the valley of death between concept and market. The Policy Forum recommends reallocating resources towards breakthrough innovation and giving European programme managers comparable independence and authority to guide the most ambitious projects, rather than spreading support thinly across many incremental efforts.

The stakes of this argument are framed in stark geopolitical terms. “Europe is caught in a middle-technology trap: we specialise in mature industries such as automotive and industrial machinery, while frontier sectors such as AI and biotechnology remain too small,” says Giorgio Presidente, researcher at the Institute for European Policymaking at Bocconi University. “To strengthen Europe’s competitiveness and strategic autonomy, we must rebuild the pipeline from scientific discovery to market, funding the best ideas and enabling researchers and innovators to turn today’s breakthroughs into tomorrow’s high-tech industries.” The middle-technology trap describes a self-reinforcing pattern in which a region’s industrial base, employment and political influence concentrate in sectors with limited growth potential, while the frontier industries that generate the highest value migrate elsewhere, often to the United States and China, dragging venture capital and entrepreneurial talent with them.

The paper’s third pillar targets the application process itself. European funding applications, the authors argue, should be shorter and assessed more directly on the substance of the idea and its potential use, rather than on the volume of documentation a proposal can accumulate. Long, bureaucratic applications favour institutions with professional grant-writing capacity over the best science, and they consume researcher time that could be spent in the laboratory. Simplifying the format would lower the barrier for first-time innovators, including those at smaller institutions, and would allow evaluators to focus on scientific and commercial merit rather than presentation.

Recognising that the European Union’s budget cannot fund every excellent proposal, the authors also propose a mechanism for rescuing projects that pass European evaluation but miss the funding cut. They recommend that national funding agencies make multi-year commitments to support such projects, extending an approach already piloted through the Seal of Excellence, a quality label awarded to proposals judged excellent by European evaluators that member states and regions can then finance from their own budgets. Formalising and broadening this arrangement would prevent top-rated science from being discarded simply because it fell just below a funding line, and would give national agencies a low-cost way to capture research value already validated at the European level.

Crucially, the authors insist that reforming Brussels will not be enough, because the most stubborn barriers sit inside universities themselves. Researchers who want to commercialise their work are frequently forced to choose between an academic career and entrepreneurship, a false dilemma that drives many of Europe’s most commercially minded scientists to leave academia, or the continent, altogether. The Policy Forum calls for greater recognition of entrepreneurship in academic career progression, improved intellectual-property management, clearer routes to patents, industrial partnerships and spin-offs, and better access to mentoring and entrepreneurial expertise through technology transfer offices. Institutions that celebrate spin-out founders rather than quietly penalising them, the argument runs, will retain and attract precisely the researchers capable of building Europe’s next generation of deep-tech companies.

The authors are careful to temper expectations. These reforms, they stress, would not by themselves resolve Europe’s wider constraints in venture capital availability, regulatory burden and business expansion, all of which shape whether a promising spin-off can scale within Europe rather than relocating abroad. But they argue that a more coherent system linking scientific research, technology development and entrepreneurship would allow Europe to capture substantially more of the economic and societal value its research already generates. “To translate more scientific discoveries into new technologies, products, and services that reach the market, we would benefit from a clearer pathway in our institutions, with well-defined steps, predictable timelines, and streamlined procedures,” says Amanda Silva Brun, Director of Research at the CNRS and one of the lead authors. “Making the entire process easier to navigate could empower more of us to transform knowledge into solutions for society. I strongly believe that embracing innovation can give new momentum to our careers, reshape how we approach our work, and enable us to play a strategic role in strengthening Europe’s global competitiveness while addressing unmet societal needs.” The Policy Forum, which underwent external peer review and revision before acceptance in Science, arrives at a moment when European competitiveness has moved to the centre of the political agenda, giving its proposals a realistic chance of shaping the design of the research programmes that will succeed Horizon Europe.

Subject of Research: European Union research and innovation policy reform to improve commercialisation of academic research

Article Title: European researchers set out EU innovation reforms in Science

Article References: European researchers set out EU innovation reforms in Science. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Horizon Europe, European Research Council, European Innovation Council, research commercialisation, innovation policy, science funding, spin-offs, technology transfer, high-risk innovation, EU competitiveness, academic entrepreneurship, INPACT!