BU Research Blog

It has been announced that Horizon 2020 will include three components for basic research, industrial technology, and ‘grand challenges’

• ‘Excellence in the science base’ will fund basic research.
• ‘Creating industrial leadership and competitive frameworks’ will fund business research and innovation, in particular for small enterprises.
•  ‘Tackling societal challenges’ will fund research that responds to grand challenges such as food security and climate change.

Horizon 2020 will increase funding for innovation through funding schemes for ‘prototyping, dissemination, demonstration, pilots, testing, user involvement, market replication, and public procurement’ and will use a single, standardised set of rules across all funding instruments to simplify procedures. In addition, it will expand the Open Access Pilot that promotes the free dissemination of EU-funded scientific publications, which now covers about 20 per cent of the Framework 7 budget.