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Synergies in research and innovation funding

1. What are synergies in funding science, research and innovation?

  • it is a cumulative or downstream method of financing research and innovation projects in which directly managed EU programmes (in particular Horizon Europe) are combined with the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF), the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), Cohesion Fund, Recovery and Resilience Facility, Digital Europe Programme, InvestEU Fund, etc. and national grant/grant programmes in the field of research and innovation

In practice, these are:
a) follow-up projects – one type of funding ends and a follow-up funding begins;

b) projects combining different sources of funding, e.g. funding for people from one programme and infrastructure from another (also known as cumulative/combined or complementary funding);

c) alternative financing - projects evaluated at the EU level as of good quality are ultimately financed by the national budget (the most widespread form in the Czech Republic);

d) agreement by national providers to pool funds and select the best projects, thereby saving and not financing duplicate projects;

 

  • implemented in the Czech Republic since 2015, being a Czech EU Presidency priority in 2022;
  • in the fiscal period of the HE 2021–2027 Framework Programme, synergies were strengthened – the EC anchored synergies in legislation for cohesion policy funds, Framework Programme and other EU programmes, and the General Block Exemption Regulation was also modified (the so-called GBER, the amendment to the Regulation was adopted by the EC on 23 July 2021);
  • to address implementation complications, the European Commission (EC) has established the Community of Practice, a working group composed primarily of representatives of providers from different countries and regions and representatives of the European Commission, where specific issues related to the implementation of synergies are discussed;

 

2. Why are synergies important and beneficial?

  • contribute to bridging the gap between old and new Member States
  • create links between different public investments in order to achieve an effect higher than the sum of the effects resulting from these investments carried out independently, but also to reduce the administrative burden for the beneficiaries of these funds when dealing with providers
  • harmonise and exploit the potential of different forms of support (grants) and financial instruments – synergies are a prerequisite for the effective use of public and private investment in research and innovation
  • the MSCA, EIC Accelerator or Teaming projects are evaluated at the European level, because Czech evaluation is not of the same quality (e.g., due to lack of experienced evaluators)

 

Milestones of synergy implementation

The leader in the topic of synergies is the Czech Republic, which dedicated an entire conference on 7-8 July 2022 to this topic as part of its presidency in 2022. The outcome of this conference was the Prague Declaration, which was a call for the European Commission and Member States to continue removing obstacles to synergies and to adopt the conclusions of the report of the European Court of Auditors (ECA) (which unfortunately came only at the end of CZ Pres). The representative of the Czech Republic is also currently leading the RIMA network, which should bring concrete steps towards better implementation of all possible synergies and map the state of removing obstacles to synergies in individual Member States.

The key EU acts on synergies are:

 

photo: pixabay

last update 8/2023

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