Project

From the ambitious Europe 2020 strategy onward, strengthening the R&I ecosystem has been a key priority and a key lever for ensuring a prosperous, sustainable future for the European Union. While R&I continues to play a critical economic role, the EC has increasingly broadened its ambitions for R&I and expanded its concept of innovation through the Innovation Union.

The Directorate-General for Research & Innovation of the European Commission (DG RTD) has implemented an evidence-based monitoring system to assess the results and progress of its ambitious investment in research, innovation, and technological development. Such a monitoring system is crucial to making sense of the complex funding landscape, connecting data to programme objectives, receiving timely insights, and identifying strengths on which to build. This monitoring system builds on various sources and collects data in a number of different tasks. Next to publication data and patent data, also data on trademarks, designs, trade secrets and copyrights are collected in a number of dimensions, which include regional differentiation, a number of scientific and technological areas - among them KETs, SGCs, SDGs or general technology fields -, but also gender and specialization profiles. In addition to data delivery and general reports on developments of the data in an international comparison, also policy briefs are to be prepared on a number of topics and research questions, which range from trends in publications and patents, via researcher mobility to gender issues and the question of technology sovereignty in Europe.