Horizon Europe, the next European Framework Programme for research and innovation, is expected to start in January 2021. A budget of almost 100 billion Euro has been proposed by the European Commission over the period 2021-2027.
The participation of Switzerland has still to be negotiated with the EU. The participation to collaborative projects can be expected, whereas participation to the individual schemes (ERC and MSCA grants for instance) will be clarified soon.
As Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe will be structured in three pillars, where each pillar has a particular driver:
It is aimed at excellent science, funding bottom-up projects from individual researchers, including notably the European Research Council grants (ERC) and the Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions (MSCA) grants.
The 2nd pillar builds around Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness. The thematic “clusters”, such as "Health", "Digital, Industry and Space", "Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society", define the priorities of the collaborative projects.
“Innovative Europe”: it supports technological advancements and the innovativeness of SMEs. It also includes the former "Future Emerging Technologies (FET)" scheme, pushing the advancement of promising technologies.
It will support, with €9.2 B, the digital transformation of EU’s society and economy and it will boost the uptake of digital technologies in public administration, areas of public interest and industry. It focuses on 3 key fields: high performance computing, AI and cybersecurity.
