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!