SUPPLEMENTARY
MEMORANDUM BY
THE DEPARTMENT
OF TRADE
AND INDUSTRY
QUESTION
Q29. What can you tell us about the views
of other Member States about the latest proposals?
Member States are generally supportive of the
revised Presidency compromise text.
At the May Competitiveness Council, the Presidency
expressed its view that a broad consensus on the conceptual framework
of the EIT had been reached. Several Member States, including
Sweden and Netherlands, share the Government's reservations about
the level of the proposed budget, in particular the call on the
"unallocated margin of budget Heading 1A".
Q30. To what extent do you agree that, even
if the EIT does go ahead, it would be a mistake to set up the
suggested new Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) from
scratch because collaboration with existing bodies—like
European Research Council and European Technology Platforms—would
be more effective for stimulating technology initiatives?
It is important to remember the rationale for
the EIT, namely to support excellence-driven strategic partnerships.
Participants in KICs will be chosen on the basis of current and
potential innovation capacity and their excellence in education,
research and innovation. These should already be exemplars in
their field and may already have existing relationships with the
other parts of the "knowledge triangle". The EIT aims
to improve these links with existing organisations and establish
much deeper relationships than they have at present.
It is also important to differentiate EIT from
other funding vehicles.
The European Research Council is a new grant
funding mechanism, established as part of FP7, to support bottom-up
blue skies basic research by top class individual researchers
or teams of researchers. The main aim of the newly-established
body is to stimulate scientific excellence by supporting and encouraging
the very best scientists and engineers. Such projects are considerably
further from the market than the ventures which the EIT might
support (for instance knowledge transfer).
The ERC is governed autonomously by a Scientific
Council of leading scientists. Being "investigator-driven",
or "bottom-up", in nature, the ERC approach allows researchers
to identify new opportunities and directions for research, rather
than being led by priorities set by politicians. This approach
ensures that funds are channelled into new and promising areas
of research with a greater degree of flexibility.
European Technology Platforms have been established
in a large number of sectors and technologies in recent years.
These are not funding mechanisms as such but industry-led networking
fora, which bring together industry and other stakeholders to
identify common priorities for research. They are generally regarded
as valuable initiatives, which have developed long term Strategic
Research Agendas (SRAs) for individual technologies and sectors.
They have also provided a major input into the thematic priorities
defined in FP7 and are helping shape individual work programmes.
It is possible that informal partnerships already formed in the
context of the European Technology Platforms could indeed help
evolve into consortia bidding to be designated a Knowledge and
Innovation Community under the EIT.
Q31. How appropriate is it for the draft
EIT Regulation to mention explicitly renewable energy and climate
change as topics for the EIT to cover in its first phase—shouldn't
it have been left to the EIT Governing Board and/or KICs to decide
priorities?
While the Government would not rule out the
possibility of Council and Parliament giving a broad political
steer to potential priority areas which the EIT could support,
such as a climate change or energy-related theme, it will be the
role of the Governing Board to draw up strategy and specify fields
of activity in which applications will be invited from partner
organisations to form a Knowledge and Innovation Community. Once
they are designated, it is important that the KICs operate with
a substantial degree of autonomy. In particular, we need to avoid
micro-management by the Governing Board or Community institutions.
Q32. What measures do you think could be
put in place to ensure that the quality of work of the KICs is
sufficiently in line with international standards?
The Government is keen to ensure that the EIT
and KICs have robust governance procedures, and that appropriate
mechanisms are put in place to ensure accountability for the EIT
and the outcomes of each KIC.
Mechanisms already exist to ensure the quality
of the educational activities carried out by the individual higher
education institutions involved in the KICs. All those countries
participating in the Bologna process agreed in 2005 a set of European
standards and guidelines for quality assurance. These essentially
define the responsibilities of institutions and provide for the
evaluation of programmes or institutions, including internal assessment,
external review, the participation of students and the publication
of results. In the UK our quality assurance framework, which is
compatible with the European standards and guidelines, ensures
that our HE sector performs to the very highest quality and remains
competitive in the global education market.
It is reassuring that external and independent
experts will be involved in the selection process of KICs, and
that a partnership will be selected and designated by the EIT
to become a KIC, on the basis of a competitive, open and transparent
procedure.
In regard to the monitoring and evaluation of
the EIT in general, the Government is reassured by the provisions
in the Presidency compromise text. The text proposes that the
activities of EIT and KICs will be subject to continuous and systematic
monitoring and periodic independent evaluation, the outcomes of
which will be made public. The Commission is also required to
draw up a proposal for a Strategic Innovation agenda, based on
a draft provided by the EIT, by 2011. This Strategic Innovation
agenda will define long-term strategic areas for the EIT and an
estimate of financial needs, and will require a decision by the
European Parliament and Council before adoption.
Q33. What are your views about the Commission's
proposals for the award of degrees with a prominent EIT "brand"?
How do you think such degrees would be regarded in the academic
and business worlds?
Throughout Working Group negotiations the Government
has opposed the idea of independent degree-awarding powers for
either the EIT, or the KICs as a collective legal entity. We welcome
the progress that has been made in Council Working Group to clarify
the provisions relating to degree-awarding powers of the EIT.
There has been clarification that degrees and diplomas will be
awarded by participating universities, and that the EIT will not
award degrees.
Whilst authority over curricula, teaching, assessment
and the awarding of degrees and diplomas will remain with the
individual institutions involved in the KICs, we can support the
idea that institutions may also wish voluntarily to provide an
EIT label on these degrees. Such a labelling could be a way of
promoting both the work of the EIT and the institutions involved
in the KICS. The Government believes that the academic and business
communities should have little difficulty in recognising these
degrees as they will essentially have been awarded by institutions
in the usual manner and would be subject to the existing quality
assurance frameworks and mechanisms in each Member State.
Q34. What is your view of the Netherlands'
request to Commissioner Figel that Treaty Article 149—relating
to Education, vocational training and youth—should be quoted
in the EIT Regulation as an additional legal base to Article 157—relating
to Industry?
France, Germany and Netherlands did raise the
issue of the legal base of EIT during initial discussions. More
recently, France, supported by Poland revisited the legal basis
of the regulation during discussion at a May Council Working Group
meeting. The response of the Presidency was that there had been
extensive discussion of this issue in Working Group and that Member
States had agreed that Article 157 was the correct legal base.
The Government's view is that Article 157 is
the appropriate legal base. The legal base should reflect the
key purpose of the EIT, namely to promote innovation through developing
a more powerful European research base.
The Community can act under Treaty article 157
to co-ordinate efforts in the field of innovation, where they
will be more effective than separate actions at national, regional
or local level. Given the nature and scale of the innovation challenge,
pooling and coordinating efforts across the EU may generate benefits
that cannot be achieved by Member States alone.
Article 149 is focused very much on educational
institutions and systems, and specifically on their role as places
of teaching and training, rather than as places of research. The
closest that Article 149 gets to the subject matter of the proposed
EIT Regulation is when it mentions "promoting cooperation
between educational establishments". In the Government's
view this is rather vague, and adding Article 149 to the legal
base of the proposed Regulation would contribute little in legal
terms.
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