Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FLAG-ERA III (The Flagship ERA-NET — FLAG-ERA III)
Reporting period: 2018-12-01 to 2019-11-30
FLAG-ERA contributes to the objectives of the two FET Flagships, namely model the brain for the Human Brain Project and bring graphene from the laboratory to the society for the Graphene Flagship. More specifically, the objective of FLAG-ERA is to support the part of the Flagship initiatives funded by national and regional funding organisations in Europe. By bringing together research teams across various disciplines sharing a unifying goal and a research roadmap on how to achieve it, and by gathering efforts funded by the European Commission and by the Member States into a long-term, large scale initiative, Flagships can aim at solving grand scientific and technological challenges. FLAG-ERA thus supports research and innovation activities which are both contributing to the FET Flagship objectives and benefiting from the synergies offered by the Flagship partnership model. A specific objective of FLAG-ERA III is to launch a new Joint Transnational Call, the JTC 2019, with a budget of about 17 M€.
During the first period, a major activity has been to launch the JTC 2019, evaluate the submitted proposals and select the projects recommended for funding. 82 pre-proposals were submitted to the call, representing a total requested funding of 50 M€. Three scientific evaluation panels, one for each call topic, were set up. 65 proposals were pre-selected and the corresponding applicants invited to submit a full proposal. These full proposals were evaluated and 60 were ranked above threshold. Out of these, 25 projects could be recommended for funding, representing a total requested funding of 16.4 M€. This represents an overall 30% success rate in term of the number of projects and a 33% success rate in term of funding. Besides, communication activities were actively pursued, mainly through the FLAG-ERA web site. In particular, news about theJTC 2017 projects and the selected JTC 2019 projects were published. Regular exchanges with the two Flagships took place at the occasion of FLAG-ERA workshops or Flagship events.
25 new projects have been selected in the framework of the JTC 2019. They add up to the 19 projects of the JTC 2015 and the 23 of the JTC 2017. Altogether, this represents a global funding of around 40 M€. These projects constitute most of the Flagship partnering projects and strengthen the Flagships.