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Esprit Monitoring, Assessment and Evaluation Activities - Esprit Home Page
This Report covers the evaluation of Esprit III, the Community's specific programme for research and technological development, including demonstration, in the field of Information Technologies (IT) 1990-1994. Given the rolling nature of the Union's IT effort, the Board also considers the initial stages of the new IT Programme. Based on Esprit III with significant changes in orientation, content, administration and execution, this got under way in 1995. On-going commitment to adaptation has permitted a seamless transition from Esprit III to its successor, even with the challenging expectations of the emerging Information Society. The Board sees this as a matter for congratulation.
Esprit is a multi-sectoral cross-disciplinary, industrially-oriented, RTD programme in an area underpinning the competitiveness of the whole European economic fabric; a programme contributing to the creation of an advanced skill base and helping to pave the way for Europe's advent into the Information Society. It has been very successful as an expression of R&D policy. It is also an enabler for other Community actions. The Programme's contributions to wider policy need to be seen in their strategic light, with a clearer picture of what the Union wants from its R&D effort. However, for the Union's effort in IT to impact decisively on competitiveness, and thus long term employment, now demands solutions which range across the whole of the Framework Programme, and beyond. Several of the Board's main recommendations are thus aimed specifically at the wider audience of policy makers within Commission, Council and Parliament.
With regard to the Programme, the Board supports the strategic management of Esprit, the Programme's breadth and its value to industry. Rather than by criticism, its recommendations for improvement are often motivated by the need to reinforce changes already taking place or to highlight shifts which the Board can perceive, but of which some participants and policy makers may as yet be unaware. The Recommendations aim to go beyond fine tuning, to reposition the Programme as it makes its contribution to the Union's strategy to raise competitiveness and ensure employment. Overall, therefore, the Board seeks to inject still greater flexibility, to further reduce response times to changes in technologies and markets and to enhance the Programme's ability to target and succour new ideas. The guidance for this should come from a significantly reinforced programme steering committee.
The Board recommends moving to a headings-only structure designed to facilitate adjustment, retargeting and reallocation of resources, thus abolishing the Work Programme as currently conceived. Headings should be arrived at through ongoing consultation of all those at the leading edge in IT, in Europe and outside, taking into account particular European needs and strengths. They should not have a set allocation or percentage of funding assigned to them. Retention of headings should be judged by results. Except in strictly basic research domains, proposals should justify their exploitation potential. Each proposal would compete against all others for funding.
Continuing today's emphasis on user involvement, closer attention could be paid to electronic systems builders and the IT user companies. In terms of structure, the Board would like to see a base of macro domains - Microelectronics, Software Technologies, Applications - with what the Report calls sub-macro domains linking all the various IT-oriented Union efforts in particular areas, wherever they currently take place within the Commission. These would rely for strategic co-ordination on the IT Programme, applying an interdisciplinary, cross-DG approach.
The pillars of this phase of the Union IT effort should be networking, exploring social demand and media synergies, exploiting telecoms liberalisation, exploiting dual use technologies. Best practice, training and diffusion efforts should be further enhanced. In Microelectronics, a strategy should be developed to target cluster technologies for microelectronics competitiveness and competence. Microelectronics is the crucial infrastructure of our time: to facilitate its spread throughout the Union, links between RTD funding and structural funds should be substantially extended. Building on European excellence in Software, attention should be paid to improving the marketing capability of producers and their export orientation. In Applications, Europe must build on niches, not be confined to them. Applications software, integration issues, customisation, need to be targeted. Enormous commercial potential exists in the Applications area, specifically in the areas of industrial competitiveness, socio-economic demand, agriculture, public administration and the commercial and industrial opportunities of the networked society. Solutions must not be Euro-centric. A global market in Applications is already emerging. It must be captured while still in its infancy.
In fact, to enhance the competitive impact of the Programme, the Board wants a more commercial approach to participation in general. Strong encouragement should be given to universities and research institutes to adopt legal forms and company structures permitting them to interface more readily with the fast-moving IT market place. The Programme should also encourage start-ups and knowledge based spin offs, originating in academia and in the corporate sector. SME representation in the advisory structure should be improved to reflect both the role of IT SMEs in innovation and, in general, the SME contribution to employment in Europe.
Administrative issues need to be tackled. At selection, projects with smaller number of partners and more focused consortia should be the rule. There should be the possibility to fund competing consortia in areas in which competition will drive innovation. In evaluation, besides excellence, value for money criteria should be adopted in proposal evaluation, and the merits of moving to a flat labour rate from today's assigned rates in costs statements should be analysed. To improve the flow of information, greater use should be made of electronic communications and the INTERNET.
The Union's IT programme has an industrial policy function. This justifies a certain emphasis on breakthrough concepts. For these, the global market impact of eventual success should be of key relevance in evaluation, assessed in terms of both the size of the potential market and the scale and impact of the potential breakthrough. In this highly fluid area, more high risk proposals should be funded. To overcome a handicap affecting in particular innovative SMEs, links should be established to Europe's venture capital community active in the IT area. Upstream of this, the Board recommends that a special, speedy mechanism be created to permit the seed funding of highly innovatory, novel ideas.
In a crucial reform for the Union's RTD effort as support for our competitive future, the Board calls for the programmes in information and communications technologies to be unified, or the present legal distinction between them to be ended. A programme "umbrella" serving as a strategic integration platform matching the various Union efforts is needed, linking today's Esprit, ACTS and Telematics, with the manufacturing results of these programmes as they mature, passed to IMT. The umbrella would rest on a common base: Long Term Research, Training, Diffusion and Dissemination of Results. The shared underpinning areas would be the macro domains Microelectronics, Software Technologies and Applications.
Whether this reform should then be extended to include combining these programmes into a single mega-programme in information and communications technologies, or placing them into some kind of single allocations envelope to facilitate reshuffling of moneys, is a matter to be decided in the run-up to future Framework Programmes.
Finally, the Board indicates several issues which, in its view, have diminished the performance and level of satisfaction of Esprit III, and if not rectified, could well cloud the possibilities of success of the new IT Programme. These centre on the deleterious effects of Commission procedures which are not specific to Esprit and over which the Programme's management has no control. The Commission financial arrangements under which both Esprit III and the IT Programme are administered need drastic reform. There should be a move to a cost system based on deliverables in technology development and application projects, except for long term research. Financial control should be decentralised to programme management teams, in line with current business practice throughout the modern world. In a similar move to adopt now tried and tested cost-efficient practices, far greater recourse must be made to the outsourcing of operational management tasks. Big savings could be achieved. These reforms would also dramatically reduce administrative burdens and speed up the payments system, helping both the Services and the participants. The Board urges the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament to act. The current situation is undermining the Union's RTD effort, European competitiveness and long term job creation. The Board's intention is to help bring what is becoming an intolerable situation to an end.
Until something can be done, the Commission should accept liability to pay interest on delayed payments. In contracts, the simplification process that is already underway should be carried through. A bankruptcy contingency fund should be set up. This would enable participants to continue work in projects in which the co-ordinator has gone bankrupt, probably now a natural and potentially not infrequent event in such a dynamic sector. In parallel with these changes, the Board recommends that a cross-service Standing Group be set up to simplify all the financial and legal matters affecting the Programme, with a wide brief.
The creativity and energy of Europe's IT community is well matched by the dedication and imagination of the Esprit staff. Yet Esprit III and its successor perform their job so well despite, not because, of overly rigid Commission-imposed procedures and practices originating outside the Programme. Given its size, impact and objectives, it is right that the IT Programme should blaze the trail for customer-oriented reform of the Union RTD effort in the run up to the Fifth Framework Programme.
Chairman: Umberto Colombo
Former Minister of Science and Technology & the Universities
Government of Italy
Rome, Italy
John Forrest
Chairman, Brewton Group Ltd
Deputy Chairman, National Transcommunications Ltd
United Kingdom
Erika Mann
Member of the European Parliament
Member of the Committee on External Economic Relations
and of the Committee on Research, Technology Development and Energy
Fritz Paschke
Professor of General Electronics
Vienna Technical University
Austria
Valentin Rodriguez
Director, AT&T Espana
Madrid, Spain
Juan Rada
Managing Director
The Environmental Partnership
Geneva, Switzerland
Rapporteur: James Ruscoe
Consultant
Rome, Italy
| Browse the Executive Summary or download the complete report | ||
| Zipped Word 6 version (174.5 Kb) | Adobe Acrobat PDF version (375.3 Kb) | Tools to decompress and read these files |
Esprit Monitoring, Assessment and Evaluation Activities - Esprit Home Page
The URL of this document is /esprit/src/colombo.htm
It was last updated on 25 June 1997 and is maintained by Esprit