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Podcast #8 – Corporate hands on Horizon 2020: An Interview with Martin Pigeon, 05/10/2017

ESNA Media

ESNA Media

Education

00 Ratings

🗓️ 5 October 2017

⏱️ 8 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As the end of the gargantuan research funding programme, “Horizon 2020” comes into view, we talk to Mr. Martin Pigeon from the Corporate Europe Observatory about the problems the programme has presented since its introduction in 2014, and how its successor, “FP9” might become a “giant battle for subsidies”. This podcast forms part of a series, produced and disseminated by ESNA Media, on the subject of higher education and science policy. Produced and edited by Tino Brömme and Ewan Consterdine Music by Zende Music ESNA European Higher Education News, Berlin www.esna.tv FULL INTERVIEW TEXT AVAILABLE HERE https://tinyurl.com/esna-pigeon

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome back to the podcast of Esna Science and Higher Education Policy.

0:06.3

This is podcast number eight.

0:08.8

And today we are here with Monsieur Martin Pigeon, who is a researcher and campaigner for the NGO Corporate Europe Observatory in Brussels.

0:18.9

When we are focusing on research funding, actually the third biggest EU budget after

0:25.0

agriculture and structural funds, we have a little headache here.

0:30.0

The current European Framework Program for Science, Research and High Education, FP8,

0:36.8

or as it has been named, Horizon 2020, runs since 2014

0:42.4

and ends in 2020. This summer, a commission produced an interim evaluation of Horizon 2020

0:49.9

for the European Parliament. The head of this commission, MEP Soledadreouise Kavison,

0:56.6

criticised that big corporations are grabbing too much of these public research funds.

1:02.1

Monsieur Pugéjean, how is that?

1:04.1

The detail of this comment, I think she is referring to the fact

1:07.5

that the Commission has kept complaining about the needs to introduce a consistent and transparent accounting method to evaluate big companies' contribution.

1:16.6

You might know that in particular in research, public-private partnerships,

1:21.6

this contribution is made in kind, whereas the EU is contributing actual money.

1:26.6

Basically, for example, if you take the EME, the Innovative Medicine Partnership,

1:32.3

so the total budget is 3 billion, but actually only 1.6 billion is actual money,

1:40.3

and it's EU money, it's public taxpayers' money.

1:43.3

The rest is an in-kind contribution of

1:45.9

industry. So this is very clear a declaration by companies that says that this is what it costs

1:50.5

them. But is there any way to double check whether this is true or not? That's an open question,

1:56.5

and I understand that the Commission still hasn't solved this problem.

...

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