Czech Presidency held EUFORDIA conference

On February 24th and 25th the EUFORDIA (European Forum on Research and Development Impact Assessment) conference took place in Prague. The conference was organized in the framework of the Czech Presidency to the Council of the EU and was co-organized by Czech Ministry of Youth, Education and Sports and Technology Centre AS CR.

The conference discussed how to analyse the impacts of the 6th EU framework programme (FP6). FP6 is the biggest international cooperation programme for R&D in the world. The conference delegates agreed that analysis is necessary, since the EU attaches great importance to research and development. This is evident from the increased budget for the 7th framework programme, which exceeds 50 bn euros.

The EUFORDIA conference addressed the analysis of the contribution of FP6 in the whole of the EU. During two conference days almost 20 speakers presented different approaches of evaluation, some national impact studies were presented as well as studies ran by different European Commission's DGs. Speakers on the closing panel of the conference were Václav Pačes (Czech Academy of Science), Theodoros Karapiperis (European Parliament), Erik Arnold (Technopolis), Peter Fisch (European Commission, DG RTD) and Julia Lane (NSF, USA). The discussion was moderated by Vlastimil Růžička, Deputy Minister of Education, Youth and Sports, and Philippe Laredo from Université de Paris-Est and the University of Manchester.

“Analysis of the outcomes of research is crucial for its financing. As is the case for all big budgets, we also need to know how efficient our spending on science and research is,” said Vlastimil Růžička about the results of the conference.

At the EUFORDIA conference a report was presented on the evaluation of FP6 that was worked out by a group of experts appointed by the European Commission. The report is available here. The report concludes that it is necessary to change the whole culture of evaluating programmes for research and development. The participants supported the conclusions of the report and had a lengthy discussion of the problems of European research, which has high ambitions of creating an environment in Europe which will also enable the individual Member States to become globally competitive. Experiences from Korea and the USA show that governments should pay much more attention to the conclusions arrived at after the evaluation of programmes. An analysis demands accessible data about the outcomes of the projects and programmes. In this respect it is possible not only to use national initiatives but also to support this trend in EU programmes.

“I was delighted to see that this conference attracted so much interest from experts. This type of event would typically be attended by around 100 experts. 300 participants is a remarkable result,” said the European Commission representative, Peter Fisch, at the press conference.

The aim of the Czech Presidency is to ensure at least that initiatives to establish suitably intelligent systems for the registration of the results of scientific research are introduced on both national and EU level.

More information about the conference are available on http://www.eufordia2009.eu.

Foto from the closing panel