It states that by working closely together, partners are helping to build scale and scope, increasing the financial leverage of European funding mechanisms, and making Europe a more attractive global partner in addressing major societal challenges. The EC intends to build on the positive results of partnerships thus far by making greater use of partnering concepts and instruments developed and implemented at European level, while recognising the need to avoid adverse effects on competition.

The Communication identifies further steps regarding governance, implementation, financing and framework conditions including: the necessity for Member States to make up-front multi-annual financial commitments and honour them; proposals to simplify instruments supporting public-public partnering by merging existing ERA-NET and ERA-NET Plus actions; and measures to ensure that key selection criteria for PPPs include scale of EU-level impact, long-term commitment of partners and leverage effect on R&I investments. The EC's proposal for Horizon 2020 will build on these steps, providing a legislative basis and common set of rules for future EU P2Ps and PPPs in R&I. An EC strategic exercise will be launched to determine where and how the partnering approach can be applied most successfully and the types of initiative to which the instruments are best suited.

Further information
The Communication on Partnering in Research and Innovation is available at: http://ec.europa.eu/research/era/pdf/partnering_communication.pdf.  Also see EC Memo MEMO/11/623 and Press Release IP/11/1059, of 21 September available at: http://europa.eu/rapid

Source: UKRO