A European excellence initiative is a challenging but intriguing idea

In his influential 2024 report on Europe’s competitiveness, Mario Draghi noted that while Europe had a strong university system, its universities were “not at the top” globally. The continent lacked the necessary scale and critical mass of world-leading scholars in closely related fields to “propel” its leading institutions “to the very top of academic excellence”.

As a solution, the former Italian prime minister recommended a European Research Council for Institutions. This would offer long-term funding to help selected universities strengthen world-leading fundamental research, as well as top-level teaching, in closely related fields.

In response, we have recently seen growing calls for a European excellence initiative. In March, for instance, the German science, funding and rectors’ councils jointly called for a new bottom-up “Nexus” programme to pool universities and research institutes that excel in particular research themes. More recently, Poland and France led an initiative in the council to create “laboratories of excellence”, linking Europe’s leading researchers and labs – again, in bottom-up calls.

In this spirit, the council’s official negotiating position for FP10, the Partial General Approach (PGA), proposes “large-scale and researcher-driven initiatives” to counterbalance fragmentation, “bringing together both established and emerging excellence centres”.

Creating a new instrument to scale up research excellence across institutions, then, is firmly on the political map. But much depends on the detail.

One key question is whether it would seek to strengthen institutions or laboratories. The German proposal appears to have both in sight, explicitly envisaging fostering collaboration between institutions to enhance their broader performance over the longer term. The Franco-Polish initiative focuses on researchers and labs, but it also seeks to raise institutional capacities in the process.

Yet if the objective is to scale up collaboration between Europe’s best researchers in cutting-edge fields, it is unclear how institutional capacity could – or should – be the goal. And given that European Universities alliances have been founded to boost collaboration across the universities’ missions, but not to bring together Europe’s best researchers in any specific field, it is also difficult to see why such a scheme would target alliances.

Another issue is where in the Horizon Europe programme the excellence initiative should be located. The ERC currently funds individual researchers, not institutions, and it is already faced with woefully insufficient funding for the sheer number of excellent proposals it receives. In the current proposal for the next Horizon Europe programme (FP10), beginning in 2028, the ERC is set to receive a significant funding increase, but even that would be barely enough to support its existing instruments and provide an overdue inflationary uplift for grantees.

The ERC might be able to support an ERC for Institutions if it receives sufficient funds over and above what is currently on the table. Realistically, however, the money would have to be taken out of the existing proposed budget for FP10, and it is really difficult to see that additional funds would be redirected from other Horizon Europe pillars into the ERC (which is part of the first, “excellent science” pillar) further to what it has already been promised.

Therefore, an excellence initiative could only be contemplated for Pillar II (“global challenges and European industrial competitiveness”) – and, indeed, the PGA points in this direction. Of course, that would mean that the funded research areas would have to fall within the commission’s designated areas of social and industrial priority – but the general consensus is that those policy windows are so broad that there is plenty of room for blue-skies research.

Whichever pillar the budget came from, how much should it be? Nexus envisages 20 networks with at least three partners, to be funded to the tune of €20 million per year for seven years. That would come to a total cost of €2.8 billion. By contrast, Germany alone spends €4.8 billion over a seven-year period on its own national excellence strategy. If Germany currently hosts 70 clusters within its strategy, and France more than 100 Laboratories of Excellence, how realistic is a goal of just 20 excellence centres across the EU, even if they bring together several labs and institutions?

Finally, this initiative is about creating scale to increase the global impact and competitiveness of European research. But it is difficult to see that it could be politically viable if money were concentrated on researchers and labs in a few institutions. At the same time, it could not be an instrument for widening participation. As the German proposal makes clear, it would have to remain a bottom-up instrument, with excellence as “the decisive selection criterion”.

The council’s text tries to square the circle. It refers to supporting both “well-established and emerging excellence”. But how could “emerging” excellence be assessed? In any head-to-head comparison, it is unclear how a centre of “emerging” excellence could outscore leading authorities with an excellent proposal.

While a European-level excellence initiative would be highly competitive and resource-intensive, it could offer grantees longer timelines to develop deeper collaboration. It could invite researchers to develop new ideas about how existing collaborations could be scaled up – and opened up – to include new and emerging researchers. And, crucially, it could provide a new and important framework for policymakers to invest in collaborative, bottom-up research.

Will those benefits outweigh its challenges? With so much at stake, it’s at least worth having the discussion.

Jan Palmowski is secretary-general of the Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities.