Projev ministra Lišky na Evropském fóru pro hodnocení dopadů programů pro výzkum a vývoj
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Welcome address by Ondřej Liška, Minister of Education, Youth and Sports
Advent of Evidence Based Financing of R&D Programmes
Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, dear colleagues,
I would like to thank you for the opportunity to take part in this conference and deliver a speech on behalf of the Czech Presidency.
I am pleased that I can welcome such a high number of research and development policy makers, representatives of universities, research institutes, professionals and experts at this European Forum on Research and Development Impact Assessment. I am personally convinced that evaluation of the R&D results and their impact assessment is really essential for the time being. This conference will deal mainly with evaluation and impact assessment of the EU framework programmes, thus programmes using public resources. Should the public support of R&D activities be sustained then we must use the public means in a transparent and accountable way. However, accountability, at the level of an R&D programme means more than satisfying some accountants rules in projects solved in the programme. Namely, it means to answer the uncompromising question: do we steer effectively the programme towards attaining its goals? Please, note, that I ask “we“. I am not saying “they“, because steering the Framework programme is our joint responsibility.
Let me remind you that in March 2000 the Lisbon European Council set up a new strategic goal for the first decade of the 21 first century, which is now approaching its end. Europe wanted „to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion”.
Moreover, two years later at the Barcelona European Council, which reviewed progress towards the Lisbon goal, it was agreed that research and technological development investment in the EU must be increased from 1,9% of GDP in 2000 to 3% in 2010. This percentage was a result of a mere comparison with our international partners, who are also our competitors, i.e. USA and Japan. Having invested for a long time some more than 2,5% of their GDP into their R&D activities, we have concluded that similar or even higher investments into our R&D system would not only keep up with them but would secure Europe its superiority in the global competition.
However, now a year prior to the end of the “Lisbon decade”, we are facing a probable outcome: that the Barcelona goal will not be met. The quite high R&D investments rather stagnated in the old member states and the low R&D investments have not been increased sufficiently in the new EU members. What has gone wrong? Our goals setting or the way we wanted to achieve them?
We are used to say that we live in a knowledge based society with its knowledge based economy. We thus indicate that knowledge is a commodity the production of which secures our prosperity. If we invest into production of cars, then we certainly increase the number of produced cars. However, does the same hold good for knowledge production? French anthropologist Theilard de Chardin contemplated that human beings are parts of noosphere, the sphere of human thinking. We can only add that we must accept responsibility for steering the complex processes running hand in hand with evolution. Human inquisitiveness and curiosity shall bring prosperity to human society. If we improve the current R&D sphere, more innovation will contribute substantially to the quality of life of European citizens. We have to identify excellent research infrastructures and focus on specific areas of R&D, to build a relevant innovation capacity of the EU.
Allow me to make a short comment on participation of the new member states in the Framework programme. I am not speaking on behalf of them, however, I want to emphasize that the new member states are, so to speak, not new in the Framework programme anymore. They participate intensively from the beginning of the Fifth Framework Programme. Majority of the new member states signed the association agreement in 1999 due to which they could participate almost under equal conditions as the EU-member states. Therefore they have ten years of experience already. It is not the length of the EU membership which divides the participation in the Framework programme, but the level of the R&D intensity, (i.e. the Gross Expenditure for R&D as percentage of the country GDP), is crucial for the level of the country’s participation in the Framework programme.
I believe that the stronger R&D system the country has, the more intensively its teams are involved in the Framework programme. In short, new member states must invest more into their R&D systems if they want to participate more intensively in the Framework programme.
We all know that measuring the impact of new knowledge production on our society is quite a complex task. I am very pleased that our partners from the USA and South Korea want to share their experience with us. I expect that the first lesson we should learn is that we must invest more into monitoring project results, into creation of new methodological tools for measuring their impact. Politicians are responsible for building up environment, which is favourable for making evidence based R&D policy. We are witnessing an advent of very sophisticated tools making it possible to objectively measure results of research activities in global dimension today. World wide databases of scientific articles, patents, a whole variety of different scoreboards summarizing and analyzing the relevant R&D data, are now more and more frequently used to formulate national and European R&D policies.
I believe that this conference will strengthen such tendencies also in case of the EU framework programmes. We are all interested in the ex-post evaluation of the FP6 that the European Commission prepared since the second half of the last year. This is the first ex-post evaluation of the whole Framework programme and we can all imagine what a difficult and demanding task it represents. I am confident that EUFORDIA will offer a rich opportunity to discuss this issue.
Let me finally emphasize that the four countries, France, Czech Republic, Sweden and Spain discussed how to contribute to enhancing the issue of the impact assessment of the Framework programme for quite a long time. We are confident that this issue must be followed continuously. As you probably know, the midterm evaluation of the FP7 will be performed already in the next year. Having this perspective in mind, the Czech Presidency wants to express its wish to lay a ground for a new tradition with this conference. A tradition of organizing European fora on research and development impact assessment on a periodical basis. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope we will achieve these goals soon and the Czech Presidency will facilitate this task successfully in the forthcoming months.
I wish you a fruitful debate and I proclaim the First EUFORDIA open. Thank you for your attention.
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Datum aktualizace: 16.8.2011 15:44
