University group sets out plan to boost collaborative EU research

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UK 08 Oct 2026

University group sets out plan to boost collaborative EU research

By Katharine Sanderson

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Image: Mikhail Nilov , via Pexels

Ideas intended to fill “gap” in Commission’s proposal for EU’s next R&I programme

The EU needs a new way of funding collaboration among excellent researchers that is not focused on their host institutions, the Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities has argued.

In a paper it published on 8 October, the Guild set out its views on how such funding should operate under the EU’s 2028-34 10th research and innovation framework programme.

It said the European Commission proposal for FP10 offers “very limited availability of funding for collaborative, curiosity-driven, high-risk, high-reward research”, and that this “gap” needs to be filled.

Not for institutions

But ideas put forward by others , including one of the MEPs leading on the design of FP10 and some EU member state research organisations, have taken the wrong approach, according to the Guild.

Their ideas, which have enough in common that they are often referred to as collectively calling for a European Excellence Initiative, err in seeking to steer support to institutions, the Guild thinks.

The supported research “must be high risk and at the knowledge frontier”, and providing funding through institutions “might excessively constrain it”, the Guild argues.

To differentiate its idea, it has suggested calling the new scheme Scale-Up Research Actions (Supra).

Supra free of constraints

Supra should not constrain researchers’ ideas, except to the extent necessary to keep them within “domains critical for [Europe’s] long-term competitiveness, prosperity and resilience”, the Guild thinks. “The calls for proposals must not be prescriptive in terms of research questions and methodologies,” it said.

“For too long, [EU] challenge-led calls…for R&I have been overly prescriptive,” explained Guild secretary-general Jan Palmowski. Calls in the collaborative pillar of the current programme are “prescriptive and skewed towards mid- and high-technology readiness levels”, the paper says, referring to a commonly used measure of projects’ nearness to commercialisation.

Instead, the new scheme should be “driven by leading researchers” and available to people working in any kind of institution, who should be encouraged to keep their collaborations open to newcomers and new ideas, the Guild thinks.

New level of ambition

Each collaboration should receive about €20 million for an initial period of up to five years, extendable by two years through a light-touch review, it suggests.

“Our ideas…would be instrumental in bringing together Europe’s researchers to pursue levels of ambition that were hitherto not possible,” said Palmowski. “This will be transformative in allowing European research to make a step-change in global leadership in new areas critical to our economic and societal wellbeing.”

MEPs are still finalising their thoughts on the design of FP10, while national governments have broadly settled on their stance but are yet to agree what budget the EU should have for 2028-34, both overall and for its individual programmes.

View this article on Research Professional