Horizon Europe in 2023

It’s been another interesting year in Horizon Europe - here’s an end-of-year summary of the top ten developments and activities in 2023:

1. The ongoing formulation of the Horizon Europe Strategic Plan 2025-2027
2. The prospective addition of up to 10 new Horizon Europe Partnerships
3. The appointments of Iliana Ivanova as the new commissioner for research, innovation and education, Marc Lemaître as Director-General of Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD) and Michiel Scheffer as the President of the Board of the European Innovation Council (EIC)
4. The assessment review of the five Horizon Europe Missions and (eventually) the decision to not add the New European Bauhaus as a sixth Mission
5. The proposed Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP)
6. The Association of New Zealand and the United Kingdom to Horizon Europe with Canada to sign an association agreement early in 2024 (full details here) and the potential acceleration of several more in 2024 and 2025
7. The launch of the Chips Joint Undertaking
8. The continuing theme of strategic autonomy and European technological sovereignty and the intertwining of Research & Innovation with geopolitics
9. The acceleration of European policy, legislative and regulatory initiatives including the Chips Act, AI Act and Raw Materials Act
10. The ongoing implementation of the New European Innovation Agenda and associated efforts to make Europe a globally competitive deeptech ecosystem.

In 2024, the European elections will take place in June with the consequent arrival of a new cohort of European Commissioners – and not forgetting discussions already started on the scope and focus of FP10.

Horizon Dashboard
Overall, the Horizon Europe dashboard shows that, to date, €25.48bn of funding has been allocated across 9,394 grant agreements involving 19,013 unique organisations. From an Ireland perspective, the pace of progress has accelerated following a slow roll out of Horizon Europe calls in 2021, with Ireland currently officially standing at €543.3m across 836 signed grant agreements involving 350 unique organisations, which represents a doubling of Ireland’s official drawdown in the last year alone (from €227m to €543.3m) and with strong performances within all three Pillars of the programme and continuing strong participation of SMEs. This means that we have now achieved more than one third of our €1.5bn national EU drawdown target.

Progress to date is testament to the combined excellence, expertise and diligence of each member of our Horizon Europe National Support Network team from across all the various government agencies and departments involved, as well as the work of the Research Offices in the Higher Education Institutes, and the individual research scientists, enterprises and other applicants to the programme. What’s much more important than the figure itself is the collective impact this funding will have on Ireland from an economic, societal, talent, and research perspective at national and regional level.

ERC win
The ending of the year brought welcome news for seven researchers based at Trinity College, UCD, RCSI, University of Limerick and University of Galway who were awarded almost €15m in European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator grants. This brings the provisional total for Ireland to €120m in ERC awards since the start of the Horizon Europe programme. You can read more here.

Latest success story
When preparing her project proposal for a competitive Horizon Europe call, Professor Anna Davies from Trinity College Dublin used an Enterprise Ireland coordinator grant to help fund the development of the proposal. She was ultimately successful in that call and CULTIVATE, an urban food sharing project, received more than €9m in funding with €2.6m going to Irish partners. You can read Professor Davies’s pointers on coordinating a Horizon Europe project further below.

National Delegate and National Contact Point (NCP) updates:
In this month's newsletter our WIDERA National Delegate and NCP based in Brussels, Gráinne Ryan, highlights many call topics including gender equality and research management amongst others while NCP Mark Sweeney takes a look at Ireland’s performance to date under Cluster 6 and opportunities under the Adaption to Climate Change Mission. Our newest NCP, Patrick Lansley, reports on Cluster 2 projects involving Irish organisations which are addressing Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society challenges.

Get in touch
If you have any questions or need support with Horizon Europe proposals, find the contact details for National Delegates and National Contact Points for specific programme areas in our directory – if you are not sure who to talk to, reach out to any member of the team who will be happy to help.

I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a happy and peaceful break over the Christmas and New Year holidays – see you in 2024!

Best regards,