Brazil (BR) is a global emerging economy, Latin American industrial and economic leader and a key international player in the science, technology and innovation (STI) field, being on the upfront of certain research and innovation (R&I) areas, such as off shore oil & gas exploration, biofuels, among others. Considering this relevance of the country in the international scene, the European Union (EU) considers BR as a privileged partner and a target country to deploy R&I activities in cooperation. By working together with BR, the EU intends to trigger collaborative scientific and technological initiatives of mutual benefit and interest, to take the lead in specific R&I areas and to tackle common societal challenges. The EU R&I funding programme - Horizon 2020 (H2020) - has a strong international cooperation component. In this context, it privileges the deployment of collaborative R&I activities with targeted countries - as is the case of BR.
That is the overall background context of INCOBRA – Increasing STI International Cooperation between BR and EU. INCOBRA intended to support the development of collaborative R&I activities between BR and EU, particularly in the context of H2020, by contributing to focusing, increasing and enhancing such bilateral STI collaboration. In order to achieve such general and specific goals, INCOBRA brings together 14 organisations from BR and EU, under the coordination of SPI, representing different BR states and different EU member states as well as different types of organisations, such as companies, universities, research centres, associations, networks and funding agencies.
On the focusing dimension, INCOBRA helped to deepen the cooperation on areas which are priority for BR-EU bilateral STI cooperation. The identified areas comprised: green energy, sustainable use of bioresources, food security and adaptation of agriculture to climate change, advanced manufacturing and nanomaterials and smart cities and smart systems. For each of these areas an Action Plan and Roadmap were designed and served as input for the Joint Steering Committee on Science Tecnology and Innovation in the process of outlining the EC Roadmap for R&I Cooperation with Brazil of October 2017.
On the increasing dimension, INCOBRA supported 5 bilateral R&I cooperation networks, which comprised R&I actors from both regions. These networks intended to align the research agenda of the partners involved and to identify funding opportunities to apply their joint research and innovation projects. These networks were BMMO (on marine research), NIUMAR (on smart cities), STI-net (on health), NANO NOC MAT (on nanotechnology) and PEARL (on space).
The increasing dimension also comprised capacity building activities, which intended to enhance knowledge, skills and capabilities of the Brazilian scientific and technology community towards H2020, bridging the gap of an effective participation of the country in the programme. In this context, a set of 13 Info Days were organized at local and regional level in Brazil, an online course comprising 7 modules was deployed and an H2020 handbook was released. All of them were held in Portuguese.
Finally, through the enhancing dimension, INCOBRA focused its efforts in working with research and innovation funding agencies from Brazil and EU members states and in trying to overcome obstacles and barriers for true joint innovation funding schemes. Throughout the project implementation it was possible to realize that this overarching goal was too ambitious to achieve during the project lifetime. Efforts were then shift to introducing Brazilian and European innovation funding agencies to each other and in stimulating the mutual sharing of experiences in terms of planning, operation and evaluation of funding schemes.
