The EU should exploit the European Research Council’s positive image and make bold choices by boosting its funds, its president Jean-Pierre Bourguignon has said.
Bourguignon made an impassioned plea for more funding for frontier research in a speech to the Horizon 2020 working group of the European Parliament’s Industry, Research and Energy Committee on 8 November.
The ERC is funding just 1 per cent of researchers working in Europe with a budget representing roughly 1 per cent of available funds for research, Bourguignon said. Only around 10 per cent of proposals submitted for ERC funding are successful, he added. The result is that “the ERC is missing [funding] a significant number of excellent projects year after year purely due to budgetary constraints”, Bourguignon said.
This article on Research Professional News is only available to Research Professional or Pivot-RP users.
Research Professional users can log in and view the article via this link
Pivot-RP users can log in and view the article via this link.