At the conference ‘Tackling Societal Challenges’ in Lund on 3 December 2015, the chairs of the different Joint Programming Initiatives summarised how to move forward with the JPI scheme.
Publicly-funded research activities in Europe have increasingly been focused on the grand challenges; health, food, water and energy supply, climate change and societal transformation. The Joint Programming Initiatives (JPI) were created to help tackling these grand challenges. Beyond the considerable progress accomplished during their first phase there are still barriers to break down in order to improve the conditions for transnational research collaboration and to move towards more aligned research systems. Within this process JPIs will continue to strengthen the momentum supported by Member States (MS), associated countries and the European Commission (EC) but also research communities, private sector and the civil society in order to enhance Europe’s ability to generate solutions for complex societal and multidisciplinary issues.
The chairs recommend the 28 MS and associated countries to:
- Increase commitment and cooperation
- Simplify and shorten interactions between EC and JPIs
- Reduce operational bureaucracy between the various networks and have key actors
- Proactively promote awareness, visibility, attractiveness and legitimacy of JPIs throughout the different layers of a diverse research system to reinforce commitment
- Align key national actions incl. research infrastructures, mobility, capacity building, databases, organisation incentives
- Develop European synergies for knowledge based solutions and policies
- Favour global participation in JPIs
- Ensure a better international coordination between JPIs, MS bilateral cooperation, EC Directorates-General and ERAC (GPC and SFIC)
- Engage in frontier research
- Generate evidence, solutions and implementation for Europe
- Exchange and disseminate the best practices of the JPIs continuously
- Develop a transparent metric of key indicators to follow progress of JPI impacts
