Ireland’s current EU Commissioner is Ms. Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, who is the Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science.
She has issued an open invitation for an online debate, to be held on June 17, on how to make Europe into an Innovation Union.
Enterprise Ireland are hosting a webinar tomorrow, March 2, entitled “How to Write a Competitive FP7 proposal”.
The summary:
The first of a series of webinars that the FP7 national support network are planning is a 1 hour Webinar on March 2: 2.15 p.m. – 3.15 p.m. The aim of this one hour webinar is to provide researchers, research managers and administrators with an overview of the key pointers on how to write professional and competitive proposals for Framework Programme 7. The webinar provides guidelines on the evaluation criteria that need to be adhered to in successful proposals and outlines the common problems in proposal writing. The webinar provides tips on useful sources of information, how to select strategic partners and finally a proven approach for proposal writing, using clear concise content. There will be a specific ICT focus to this webinar.
The presenter is Miguel Ponce de Leon, Research Manager at WIT’s Telecommunications Software and Systems Group (TSSG). The TSSG is Ireland’s most successful research group in terms of research income from the Framework Programme.
If you’re in the research space in Ireland and are considering looking for FP7 funding, it should be well worth tuning in to the webinar.
I wrote previously about the Ideas Programme run by the ERC that I was briefly responsible for. The deadline for the Starter Grants has just passed, and we have been informed that the ERC received a total of 9,167 applications from across Europe, of which 126 were Irish.
Given that only 200—250 grants will be awarded, that means that there are going to be an awful lot of disappointed people: a success rate in the region of 2.5%.
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…