Ken Guy

In Europe around 85 percent of civic public research funds is programmed, financed, monitored and evaluated at a national level. Less than 6 per cent of total R&D investment and only 15 per cent of European publicly financed civil R&D1 is financed in a cross-border, collaborative manner (European Commission, 2008a). This fragmentation2 of research funding in Europe has variously been put forward as a barrier to the attainment of the critical masses of research excellence, a potential source of duplication of effort and an inefficient use of administrative resources.3 It has, in fact, been widely interpreted as one of the main factors preventing Europe from achieving its full research potential. In this context, the ERA-NET scheme was launched in 2002 as part of the Sixth Framework Programme (6FP) to improve coordination between Member States in terms of the design, implementation and evaluation of R&D programmes. It was conceived as a bottom-up approach to foster transnational colla...

Every four years, the European Union conducts an assessment of its past research activities. On the last two occasions (2000 and 2004) this has involved a questionnaire survey to Framework Programme participants focused on goal attain-ment, project impacts and overall ...

It is the year 2005 and the Managing Director of Biomat has a problem. Her spin-off firm builds replacement human organs using metagenic technology, but after two years of success Biomat is at a crossroads. Should it stick to metagenics, which is costly and prone to production ...

Foresight programmes are usually evaluated in terms of the achievement of initial objectives and the scale and nature of direct, anticipated impacts, notwithstanding the difficulty of measuring such impacts. However, indirect and/or unanticipated impacts that fall outside ...