Commission presents its evaluation of the 7th Framework Programme for Research

The European Commission has published its ex-post evaluation of the 7th Framework Programme (FP7). Main findings include increasing the competitiveness of Europe’s industry and positive impact on growth and jobs, fostering of inter-disciplinary research, alignment of research activities between Member States and substantial progress as regards the gender dimension.

The shortcomings in the implementation of FP7 are the further improvment of large-scale simplification; the different parts of FP7 programme operating too much as isolated silos; and the inefectiveness in building synergies with related European funding programmes.

The evaluation identified ways to improve how the EU funds research and innovation, of which many issues are already being taken up by Horizon 2020, the successor programme to FP7. Read more…