PKH Opinion on European Partnerships under FP10 published

The aim of the opinion is to advise the European Commission in preparing its proposal for the next Framework Programme, so that the co-legislators in the Parliament and the Council can use it as a benchmark when negotiating the future partnership portfolio.


Our opinion at the Partnership Knowledge Hub (PKH) is that the new policy approach on R&I partnerships of Horizon Europe continues to remain relevant. However, we believe that the implementation of this approach has yielded mixed results, and we therefore present below a number of concrete suggestions and recommendations on how to improve R&I partnerships along their life cycle and make them even more attractive for all sides of the partnership. For reasons of readability, we focus more on the improvements we can make to partnerships and less on the impressive achievements of partnerships in making the ERA a reality. 

Partnerships can only achieve their objectives and meet the objectives of society, if they: (i) are attractive for the best researchers and innovators; (ii) create value added for all sides of the partnership; and (iii) are built on trust and mutual understanding. The key ingredient for the third point of trust and mutual understanding is sufficient time. The time needed to set up often rather large R&I partnerships and make them work efficiently and effectively is often underestimated. 

For this reason, in this opinion document, we stress the importance of allocating sufficient of time to building future partnerships. If we want to have an even better-functioning partnership portfolio at the start of the new 7-year budget cycle, we should start now to work towards the vision we present in the pages below. The PKH was established for this task and is ready to work with the EU, Member States, interested Associated Countries and the partnerships themselves.

Alexander Grablowitz, PKH Co-chair


Download the PKH Opinion

Published : 13/01/2025