This second Monitoring Report on Horizon 2020 focuses
on the implementation of the second year of the Work Programme
2014-2015, which was adopted in December 2013.
Horizon 2020 marks a shift towards the use of
indicators that aim to capture results and impacts. The legal basis
of Horizon 2020 specifies a list of compulsory Key Performance
Indicators to be taken into account in its evaluation and
monitoring system.
It provides timely information on
participation, implementation, cross-cutting
issues, as well as overviews by thematic
area.
The report largely relies on input indicators
in the form of EU funding, participations and applications. Early
output has started to become available from the funded projects,
such as publications, patent application and patent awards. These
kinds of data, as they start to become more robust, will provide
valuable evidence on the performance of Horizon 2020 in the
future.
The report found good progress had been made on the
14 horizontal cross-cutting issues assessed, even though the
ambitious target for climate change has not yet been reached.
Progress remains to be made in terms of data gathering and
monitoring of outputs of the programme, in particular on the
Key Performance Indicators.
The main positive findings of the monitoring
report are as follows:
- Interest in Horizon 2020 is growing: there was a strong increase in the general number of
applications by 23.9% over 2014 (or close to 30 000
more).
- Horizon 2020 is attractive to private
business: Horizon 2020 saw an
increase in the number of applications from the private sector by
26.5% from 2014 to 2015 (or over 11 000 more applications). Horizon
2020 is also an attractive means for academia and industry to
collaborate – this was underlined by the survey of National
Contact Points (NCPs), in which 83% agreed that Horizon 2020
provides sufficient opportunities for cooperation between science
and business.
- There is high potential for R&I in
Europe: only one out of every four
high quality proposals is funded. An additional EUR 41.6 billion
would have been necessary in the first two years of Horizon 2020 to
fund all the over 25 000 high quality proposals, which were not
funded. This underlines the huge potential for high quality
research and innovation in Europe.
- Funding going to EU-13 Member States rose
slightly: there was an observable
trend towards more funding for those Member States which joined the
EU in 2004 (EU-13) or more recently in Horizon 2020. The total
share of the funding going to these countries increased from 4.3%
in 2014 to 4.7% in 2015. However, success rates for EU-13
applicants remain lower than for the other EU Member
States.
- Grant signature has accelerated: the average time elapsed from call deadline to grant
signature keeps declining throughout Horizon 2020: the average
time-to-grant dropped by 31.7 days from 2014 to 2015 (or 15%
shorter).
- The monitoring report also highlights some points
requiring attention:
- Oversubscriptions: in
spite of very similar funding rates in 2014 and 2015, the growing
interest in Horizon 2020 presents a challenge. In total, over 8 500
more proposals where submitted in 2015 than in 2014. This is
reflected in lower success rates in 2015 than in 2014 throughout
Horizon 2020: both in terms of numbers of proposals, from 13.2% to
10.7%, and in terms of funding, from 14.2% to 10.9%.
- International collaboration: although the share of participation of non-EU
countries in internationally open collaborative projects increased
from 2.1% in 2014 to 2.8% in 2015, and for all projects from
1.7% in 2014 to 2.0% in 2015, the share of non-EU country
participation in FP7 was higher (i.e. 4.0% for all projects and
4.3% for collaborative projects).
- Newcomers: the
participation of newcomers to the programme was identified by the
NCP survey, as the most challenging area. On average, applications
from participants with FP7 (7th Framework Programme for
RTD) experience have success rates that are 4 percentage points
higher, and the difference is even higher for SMEs. In addition,
the shares of newcomers’ participation vary greatly across the
programme: from 1.4% (for the ERC) to 38.3% (in Societal Challenge
3).