Building and Improving Support for RTD Policy and Public Spending (FP6-2005-RTD-OMC-NET)
Building support to achieve the Barcelona target of 3% has been identified as one of the key challenges of the revised Lisbon Agenda. Although the emphasis of building political will and the effort to design appropriate RTD funding policies and implementation mechanisms rests at the national level, European regions deserve a more prominent role in this process.
Most of European regions face a vicious circle of low and/or inadequate RTD funding – modest performance in knowledge production and low growth of productivity, blamed on poor contribution of RTD, and consequently low levels of support to RTD funding. The contribution of science is generally a complex and long-term issue and there are very few cases of successful communication on RTD benefits within the body politic and vis-à-vis the general public.
The project has as a general goal to build a methodological framework and a learning platform for regional and national RTD policy makers and stakeholders interested in obtaining support arguments for their requests to bring public research funding to the Barcelona target level. In order to develop these tools, the consortium will:
- identify and evaluate existing RTD funding models, policies and instruments in participating regions/countries including their communication
- identify critical success factors for RTD funding policies resulting in enhanced research and innovation performance
- select and present good practice cases assisting policy makers through mutual learning and benchmarking
- formulate guidelines for successful target-oriented RTD funding policies and their implementation
- offer recommendations to RTD policy makers on communication tools for obtaining funding levels necessary for ‘competitiveness-minded’ research, leading to new and improved products and services
The project will execute RTD funding audits (evaluating performance vis-à-vis financial resources) in all participating regions/countries. These will be conducted on the basis of reports compiled by the respective teams, by a small group of experts from other regions and members of the Project Advisory Group.
One of the added values of the project will be the application of the time-distance methodology. This application of the statistical measure, analytical and presentation tool has the advantage of being simple, graphic and easy to understand by the general public. For example, instead of identifying the difference in RTD funding between participating regions only through percentage differences between compared units, the gaps will be expressed also in number of years for which regions/countries are lagging behind the best region/country in the group or other relevant benchmark.
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