As many of you in the research community will know, the European Commission is currently putting the finishing touches to Framework Programme 7 (FP7). One of the new components of FP7 is called the ‘Ideas Programme’. This programme will be run and managed by a new agency called the European Research Council (ERC).
The Ideas Programme is particularly interesting in that it moves away from the idea of international, inter-institution consortia that are the norm in the Cooperation Programme. Instead, Ideas has the primacy of the individual Principal Investigator as its central tenet.
What this means in reality, is that individual, independent researchers will be able to seek significant funding for themselves and their teams, without having to enter into one of the large European research networks. This is a fairly radical departure for the EU, and one that it particularly welcome.
Of course, the Cooperation programme is still present in FP7, and still makes up the bulk of the FP7 budget. Nevertheless, the ERC has been given substantial funding: approximately €7.5 billion over the 7 year lifetime of FP7.
Why is this relevant? Well, SFI has been nominated as the government agency with responsibility for spearheading the ERC/Ideas initiative within the national FP7 strategy. Enterprise Ireland is the lead agency for the initiative, with other agencies taking responsibility for different parts of the framework.
EI are developing a new website for FP7, but for the time being have a small section of their current site devoted to FP6 & FP7.
I will write more on FP7 and the ERC in due course. Watch this space…
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2 responses so far ↓
Interesting amounts of money up 4 grabs.
Is there any (or has there been any in the past) post evalation on how "successfull" these projects were?
What criteria do they apply (from a ‘who that was great value - that money was well spent’)
I know there is criteria (mostly peer review?) for what proposals get funded as projects
Lal
Brendan,
the amount of funding on offer through the ERC is very significant. One of my SFI colleagues, Graham Love, is managing the ERC process from SFI’s perspective. He might be worth contacting to discuss these issues.
You’ll find his details on the SFI website: http://www.sfi.ie
Steve