The European Commission published the first draft of the Horizon Europe Implementation Strategy. It provides the framework for designed rules and processes across the entire programme and project life cycle. As stated in the press-release, this documents is a „a living text that will evolve and grow as preparations and deployment unfold during 2020. It reflects the situation on 1 January 2020. A progress report will be published in the second semester 2020.“ It remains unclear how the ongoing developments will affect this process.

The Strategy focuses on following objectives:

• Maximising impacts, because more has to be done to boost and focus the impact of European R&I spending, and Horizon Europe has been conceived with this in mind. The programme has high level objectives that cut across the programme, pathways to impact addressed at every level, and special arrangements envisaged to implement the new high-impact schemes such as missions and the European Innovation Council (EIC);

• Ensuring greater transparency and further simplification, by maintaining and building on the substantial improvements made under Horizon 2020, while capitalising on lessons learned, and taking advantage of modern and innovative approaches;

• Fostering synergies with other EU spending programmes, to ensure that we can implement in practice the legal provisions built into Horizon Europe and the reciprocal arrangements in sister programmes across the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), capitalising also on the Commission-wide priority setting established through strategic planning;

• Easing access through digital transformation and outreach, to ensure that the whole implementation is designed in a joined-up and holistic way, supported by modern outreach channels and practices and robust electronic platforms and tools for engaging stakeholders along the programme life-cycle, increasing communication on data and results, and exploiting new approaches as these mature, including Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The implementation strategy is available here.