The paper is the product of INPACT!, a network launched in 2023 that brings together more than 120 scientist-innovators from over 20 countries across the European research area, many of them grantees of the European Research Council. The initiative combines the direct experience of researchers who have attempted to commercialise their discoveries with economic analysis of European funding programmes. Among the co-authors are Associate Professor Mehmet Cengiz Onbaşlı of Koç University’s College of Engineering and Professor Erdem Yörük of Koç University’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities, alongside leading researchers from institutions across Europe, including Dario Polli, Professor at Politecnico di Milano, and Amanda Silva Brun, Director of Research at the CNRS, who serve as lead authors.

At the centre of the analysis sits Horizon Europe, the European Union’s flagship research and innovation programme covering the period from 2021 to 2027. The authors argue that although the programme channels enormous resources into excellent science, its funding architecture remains fragmented in ways that penalise researchers attempting to move from laboratory discovery to market application. In particular, they identify an administrative gap between European Research Council Proof of Concept grants, which help researchers explore the practical potential of their fundamental discoveries, and European Innovation Council programmes, which support technology development and business growth. Ideas that successfully navigate one programme can stall at the boundary of the next, losing momentum precisely when commercial promise is greatest.

The Policy Forum’s headline proposal is to bring the ERC Proof of Concept grants under the governance of the European Innovation Council, creating a single, continuous pathway from scientific discovery through technology development to commercialisation. According to the authors, such a restructuring would reduce repeated evaluation cycles, simplify transitions between funding instruments and make support more predictable for both researchers and the investors who back them. Predictability, they contend, is a decisive factor in whether promising ideas attract the sustained capital and institutional patience required to mature into viable ventures.

The urgency of the reform case is underlined by the authors’ observation about where the value of European science is ultimately captured. ERC-funded research, they note, is disproportionately cited in patents filed by United States start-ups rather than European ones, meaning that too much of the latent economic value generated by European public investment is realised elsewhere. Onbaşlı argues that the commercialisation pipeline needed to build many more European unicorns must be paved with complementary incentive mechanisms, so that discoveries made with European funding generate European companies, jobs and societal benefits rather than enriching innovation ecosystems abroad.

Beyond structural reorganisation, the Policy Forum calls for substantially stronger support for early-stage, high-risk innovation. Combined annual funding for the EIC Pathfinder and Transition programmes currently stands at approximately 500 million euros, a figure the authors describe as modest, while their programme-management capacity remains limited compared with advanced research agencies in the United States. The authors recommend reallocating resources towards breakthrough innovation and empowering independent programme managers with greater authority to guide promising projects through their most uncertain phases. This model of empowered programme management, they suggest, draws on the practices of agencies that have demonstrated an ability to nurture transformative technologies by backing exceptional people and ideas over long horizons.

The paper also targets the bureaucratic burden of European funding applications themselves. The authors argue that proposals should be shorter and assessed more directly on the substance of the idea and its potential use, rather than on exhaustive administrative detail that consumes researcher time without improving selection quality. In parallel, they propose that national funding agencies make multi-year commitments to support excellent projects that successfully pass European evaluation but cannot be financed from the available EU budget. This approach would extend the model already established through the Seal of Excellence, a quality label that allows national and regional programmes to co-fund projects judged excellent at European level but left unfunded due to budget constraints.

Yörük frames the underlying problem in stark terms: the challenge is not a lack of excellent science but the weakness of the mechanisms that translate scientific research into economic and societal value. Addressing this, he argues, requires a more continuous pathway from research to proof of concept, entrepreneurship and scale-up, together with academic incentives and institutional structures that support each stage of that journey. The diagnosis shifts responsibility away from individual researchers and towards the systems in which they operate, a framing that has resonated widely among European scientists who have watched colleagues abandon commercialisation efforts or relocate to environments with better innovation support.

Crucially, the authors insist that reforming European funding alone will not be enough. 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 within academic career structures, improved intellectual-property management, clearer routes to patents, industrial partnerships and spin-offs, and better access to mentoring and entrepreneurial expertise. In many European institutions, entrepreneurial activity remains undervalued in hiring, promotion and tenure decisions, sending a signal that commercial engagement is peripheral to academic life. The authors argue that reversing this signal is essential if Europe is to retain its most commercially minded talent.

Silva Brun emphasises that institutions would benefit from a clearer pathway for translating discoveries into market-ready technologies, with well-defined steps, predictable timelines and streamlined procedures. Making the entire process easier to navigate, she argues, could empower more researchers to transform knowledge into solutions for society, give new momentum to academic careers and enable scientists to play a strategic role in strengthening Europe’s global competitiveness while addressing unmet societal needs. The authors are careful to note that their proposed reforms would not by themselves resolve Europe’s wider constraints in venture capital availability, regulation and business expansion. Nevertheless, they conclude that a more coherent system linking scientific research, technology development and entrepreneurship could help Europe capture far more of the economic and societal value generated by its exceptional research base, turning scientific excellence into a durable engine of European competitiveness. The Policy Forum underwent external peer review and revision before its acceptance and publication in Science on 24 September 2026.

Subject of Research: EU research and innovation policy reform to strengthen the pathway from scientific discovery to commercialisation

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, INPACT!, research commercialisation, science policy, innovation funding, technology transfer, academic entrepreneurship, Proof of Concept grants, Europe competitiveness, Science Policy Forum

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!