N°7, 6th June 2008
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Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7)
Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP)
Tenders Electronic Daily (TED)
The 2008 EARTO Annual Conference and associated meetings in Madrid on 28th - 30th May were a considerable success. Hosted by FEDIT, the Spanish Federation of Innovation and Technology Organisations, the meeting attracted around 300 participants.
The Working Group and conference presentations are available on the EARTO website. A selection of photographs and video of the event will be uploaded there shortly.
The Annual General Meeting of the Association took place in Madrid on 30th May.
The meeting approved the accounts for 2007 and the budget for 2008. All related documents are available on the members' page of the EARTO website.
The meeting also voted new members to the Executive Board:
RTOs in the United Kingdom make a major contribution to the UK economy and society according to a just published study by Oxford Economics link.
They contribute an estimated €4.5 billion annually to the UK economy and support 60,000 jobs. But these are just the direct effects: the indirect effects are estimated to be many times larger.
The study argues that RTOs also play an important role in facilitating the commercial exploitation of academic knowledge, in correcting market failures, and in helping the government achieve its policy and procurement objectives.The report closes with a recommendation that the government should more actively support RTOs.
When the Commission's Green Paper “The European Research Area: New
Perspectives” was published, several Expert Groups were set up for each of the six ERA dimensions identified in the Green Paper, and one on the overall vision and rationales for ERA. This "ERA Rationales Group" has just published its reportlink.
Whereas the Green Paper had little to say about the demand for R&D from industry or government, and also practically nothing about RTOs, the ERA Rationales report offers interesting ideas. It contains two pages devoted to the important role played by RTOs in the innovation ecologies in Europe and it endorses an EARTO proposal that the Commission should introduce new measures to stimulate contract research in Europe, e.g. by offering a bonus on cross-border research contracts.
EARTO will be carefully monitoring the Commission's response to this proposal.
EARTO is launching an experiment with technical Special Interest Groups. The idea is to group together members with complementary technological expertise in specific fields of application, in order to develop joint projects and to bid for contracts.
The first group is being launched with Neven Zarkovic from new EARTO member Rudjer Boskovic Institute in Croatia. He proposes two fields of application:
Interested members are invited to contact:
Neven Zarkovic M.D., Ph.D.
Senior Scientist
Laboratory for Oxidative Stress
Rudjer Boskovic Institute
Bijenicka 54,
10000 Croatia
Phone: ++385 1 457 1234 / 456 0937
Fax: ++385 1 456 1010
E-mail: zarkovic@irb.hr
The first meeting of the newly established Working Group on Quality and Excellence in RTO Management will take place in Brussels on 16th June.
The principal aim of this first meeting is to identify the issues on which the Group would like to work. Relevant issues are likely to be:
Further items on the agenda of this first meeting are:
Any member interested in joining the group, should please contact Kadija Taffah as soon as possible.
An EARTO Working Group on RTO Career Development Programmes and related human resource issues has formed. It will hold a first meeting in Trondheim on June 17th, hosted by SINTEF. Among the items for discussion are:
Any members interested in participating in this activity are invited to contact Kadija Taffah.
How successful is your RTO in FP7? To be able to compare yourself against other RTOs, EARTO has launched an FP7 Performance Benchmarking service. This is an online database in which you can enter - anonymously - basic information about the number of proposals you have submitted, how many passed threshold, and how many receive funding. Data are collected for all of the main programmes within FP7 (thematic priorities, ERC, SME measures etc).
First results based on data from 18 members are already available on the members-only page of the EARTO website. Please visit the page to see how useful the service is and then submit data for your RTO.
For more information, please contact Nina Baumeister.
"Responsible Partnering" is a voluntary code of conduct for innovative companies and research organisations to enable them to collaborate more effectively and at the same time contribute to the achievement of their respective missions in a sustainable way.
The Responsible Partnering guidelines have been developed by experienced practitioners of collaborative research from four European associations representing the needs of Industry (EIRMA), Research & Technology Organisations (EARTO), Universities (EUA) and Knowledge Transfer Organisations (ProTon Europe). It is based on the analysis of the main problems preventing effective collaboration and also on the success stories where such collaboration was effectively achieved.
The Responsible Partnering Initiative continues in 2008, with two principal goals. One is to update the Responsible Partnering Code of Conduct, for which purpose a feedback event is planned in conjunction with the COPENMIND exhibition in Copenhagen on September 1st-3rd.
The other goal for 2008 is to prepare a document to help stakeholders in both the public and private sector better understand and implement the EU State Aid Framework for R&D and Innovation. The available Commission documents give little practical guidance about how to interpret and implement critical principles of the State Aid Framework. The result is uncertainty and a reluctance to take decisions: whereas the policy intention should be to provide certainty and hence stimulate innovation. The Responsible Partnering consortium aims to produce a document with practical advice to help stakeholders implement the State Aid Framework constructively.
EARTO gives space in this newsletter to members who would like to publish their job vacancies. Please contact Nina Baumeister.
Please find the job description here.
The closure date for the 2008 Research for SMEs Call for Proposals is likely to be December 18th. Publication of the Call is expected in September.
In the last newsletter we wrote about the IP policy of the IMI Joint Undertaking. We are concerned that the IMI policy opens up possibilities for industrial partners in IMI-funded projects to obtain royalty-free access to foreground, to background, and to sideground, and also that access could be available to affiliates (mother companies as well as downstream affiliates) anywhere in the world.
The CEOs of the larger national RTOs, meeting as the EARTO-EUROTECH Special Interest Group, issued a statement expressing these concerns after the recent EUROTECH meeting in Dresden on April 7th. EU Research Commissioner Potocnik has responded to their statement with a letter which opens the way to a meeting between EARTO experts and senior IMI management.
Since publishing the statement about IMI's IPR policy, further concerns have emerged in relation to the IMI funding model. The Commission and IMI have announced that research partners in IMI-funded projects will receive 75% funding for direct costs, with a fixed-rate 20% funding for overheads. This is unacceptable for RTOs.
EARTO proposes to meet IMI to discuss these issues in late June. Further news here in due course.
We reported in the last edition of EARTO News that the European Commission has published a recommendation on the "management of intellectual property in knowledge transfer activities and a Code of Practice for universities and other public research organisations". This is a non-binding recommendation for Member States and is intended to make EU national systems more coherent and boost transnational academia-industry cooperation to turn more research into lucrative business results.
EARTO's Intellectual Property Task Force made a substantial contribution to the Commission document. The published final version, however, contained a recommendation which is unacceptable to RTOs: “In the case of contract research the foreground generated by the public research organisation is owned by the private-sector party”. In EARTO's view, it is essential to distinguish between foreground results, on the one hand, and the related IPRs, on the other, and to provide for flexibility in negotiating IP ownership.
EARTO subsequently intervened with the Commission and successfully proposed a change of wording to the Council resolution on the Recommendation which now specifies that "collaborative and contract research in this document are to be understood in the sense of the Community Framewrk for State Aid for R&D&I ...". This modification has the advantage of referring to a much more nuanced definition of contract research. Council adopted its resolution with the change proposed by EARTO.
The full text can be found here.
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The EARTO first-floor meeting room is available for meetings of up to 16 participants at cost price to EARTO members.
Bigger meetings can be accommodated in a large, modern meeting room on the 5th floor of our building at a very attractive price.
Members are also welcome to use our small room suitable for up to five people free of charge.
For further information, please contact Catherine Colassin at the EARTO Secretariat: +32-2-5028698
November 8 - 9, 2010
ESWIRP first workshop, Cologne, Germany
October 27, 2010
EARTO Innovation Prize - ceremony
October 11 - 15, 2010
2nd European Innovation Summit
September 23, 2010
DESCA Consultation Group Meeting
September 22, 2010
DESCA Core Meeting
September 16, 2010
EARTO Communication Task Force, Brussels
September 15, 2010
EARTO Innovation Prize Jury Meeting, Brussels
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