ERA-Platform-Meeting of ERA-Nets and European Instruments related to Biotechnology and Innovative Technologies

Representatives of eight biotechnology oriented ERA-NETs, two ERA-NET COFUNDS, two PPPs and representatives from the EuropaBio and the European Commission gathered 2-3 September in Riga, Latvia to exchange experiences and present new developments as part of the ERA Platform programme. It was a lunch to lunch meeting organised by ERA-IB at the Hotel Astor in central Riga.

The agenda of the meeting had the following headlines

• Institutional Public-Private Partnerships
• Contractual Public-Private Partnerships
• Support to Public-Public Partnerships
• Joint Programming Initiatives (JPIs)
• European Research Area Networks (ERA-NETs)
• European Research Area Networks COFUND (ERA-NET – COFUND)

The stage was set by an extensive presentation by Carmen de Vicente Coll, DG Research and Innovation, on Horizon 2020, giving an overview of the new challenges, areas and instruments related to research in biotechnology. Later, Jörg Niehoff, from the unit B2 – ERA-Policy and Reforms, DG RTDI, gave an update of new instruments in Horizon 2020 to support Public-Public Partnerships. He presented an historical overview on how ERA-NETs had been moved over to ERA-NET COFUNDs, and how this development now would move further to even larger partnerships. He also gave some indications on how these new instruments are considered to function as proposed by the Commission. The message was very clear; the future will bring larger partnerships than we see today, where the Member States are expected to commit themselves together with the Commission.

As an example of Institutional Public-Private Partnerships Dirk Carrez gave an excellent status of how the JTI BBI – Joint Technology Initiative Biobased Industries had been launched, and illustrated some of the contents of the latest call from July 2015. Loredana Ghinea gave a similarly interesting presentation on the Contractual Public-Private Partnership cPPP SPIRE – Sustainable Process Industry through Resource and Energy Efficiency.

How Joint Programming Initiatives (JPIs) could work together with ERA-NETs and other European collaborative initiatives was explained by Christine Bunthof, who presented JPI FACCE – Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change. In a series of 15 min flash presentations the following ERA-NETs were presented:

ERA-Net IB2, ERA-Net SysApp, ERA-Net ERA-CAPS, ERA-Net MarineBiotech, ERA-Net SynBio, EuroTransBio, ERA-Net Bioenergy, ERA-Net COFUND CoSysMed and ERA-Net COFUND E-Rare-3. In this session ERA-Net MarineBiotech was presented by Torger Børresen.

All ERA-NETs presented the various calls, procedures applied and results obtained. This was a very valuable exchange of information, illustrating how the different ERA-NETs could learn from each other. This was also highlighted in a presentation by Christine Bunthof, explaining how ERA-Platform functioned in assisting the ERA-NETs related to the KBBE network to work together and illustrated how earlier events had been arranged.

The meeting was concluded with a round-table session where all participants expressed their views on how the challenges of the activities related to the different European instruments could be met in the future. The meeting was excellently chaired by Gabriele Süptitz, ERA-Net IB.

The participants were guided through a very interesting tour of the Jugendstyle part of Riga city with a range of beautifully decorated house facades before the conference dinner.