(Science|Business) ERC mobilises stakeholders to support link between basic research and competitiveness

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As the EU’s champion of basic, curiosity-driven research, the European Research Council (ERC) is struggling to find its place in a policy discourse dominated by competitiveness. So, on April 10, it brought together Nobel prize winners and industry leaders, amongst others, for a high-level event in Brussels to discuss how innovation is built on basic research.

“Scientific breakthroughs, real innovation, and building a sustainable society in the future, indeed, start at the bottom,” said Ben Feringa, a professor at the University of Groningen and Nobel prize laureate in chemistry. “It needs creativity and imagination, education, excellent basic research, [and] the training of young scientists.”

“Industry was born out of science and not the other way around,” said Jean-François van Boxmeer, the chair of the European Roundtable of Industry, and another delegate to the meeting. 

Luis Serrano Pubul, the director of the Centre for Genomic Regulation Barcelona and an ERC grantee, warned that EU politicians were now fixated on creating “value” and had forgotten the need to fund fundamental research. “They don’t realise that if we only implement, soon there will be nothing to implement because there will be no discoveries left,” he said.

Part of the challenge the ERC faces is that it does not know how the European Commission’s focus on economic growth will manifest itself in future policy. The chief concern of the research community has been that Horizon Europe’s successor, FP10, could be folded into a European Competitiveness Fund. Since this will include the ERC, there are fears this may undermine its ability to invest in basic research, free from strategic direction.

As well as a public session, last week’s event included a closed workshop in which delegates discussed how they might respond. “We don’t know what the Commission is planning in terms of the Framework Programme or Competitiveness Fund, so we just spoke in far more general terms,” Maria Leptin, the ERC president, explained to Science|Business after the debate.

The mood of the workshop was that the research community had to “do something,” Leptin said. “We just have to come up with what.” 

Risk and translation

As well as insisting on the need to maintain funding for basic research, the meeting also discussed the actions required to ensure that the results of this research are exploited.

“Many researchers in Europe don’t realise that they can create value,” Serrano Pubul said, “and that they don’t need to pervert or change what they are doing. And I think we need to convey this culture [to them].”

Others emphasised that researchers needed to be more open to taking risks with their research. “There are not many things that are worth doing that don’t have some risk associated with them,” said Jeremy O’Brien, the co-founder and head of quantum computing start-up PsiQuantum, which is also an ERC grantee. “If you’re a university professor, never mind if you’re a university student, you’re a pretty privileged individual on this planet, and you can afford to take some risk.”

He believes that it’s even more true in Europe, which offers them “a considerable safety net.” 

Marcus Schindler, the chief scientific officer and executive vice-president of Novo Nordisk, also discussed the transition from basic to applied research. “When the time is right, we might pivot from something interesting to something useful,” he said. “Maybe we are confusing risk with the unknown.”

Schindler also wants to see researchers given more experience of commercial environments, and called for grants to encourage, if not demand, movement across sectors. This would help the youngest researchers gain a stronger business mindset, and turn ideas into a project or a product.

Feringa also noted that scientists do not work in isolation. Advances in society are the fruit of “a solid basis in fundamental science and cooperation among many disciplines [. . .] together with our partners from industry,” he said.