What are the new dissemination and communication requirements of Horizon Europe?
By Dan Gerstenfeld
The European Union’s ambitious Horizon Europe funding programme for research and innovation will include many changes that will require participants to change the way in which they submit, manage and commercialise their projects.
The European Commission has already hinted on several occasions that one of the key changes in the new €95.5 billion funding programme will be paying much more attention to the dissemination, communication and exploitation of project results.
In order to clarify the key dissemination and exploitation requirements of Horizon Europe, the commission held a special webinar on June 9, 2021 which outlined the major changes.
Maximize impact
The main message arising from the webinar was that the EU wants to maximize the impact of funded projects in order to improve the chances of exploiting successful results, with speakers emphasising that the commission views the publication of the project’s results as a high priority.
“Communication, dissemination and exploitation activities are an integral part of the Horizon project and of Horizon Europe in particular,” said Stephanie Weber from the European IP Helpdesk. “This is crucial to help maximize the impacts of EU research and innovation funding.”
Whereas in the previous Horizon 2020 programme project organisers may have viewed dissemination and communication as annoying requirements that needed to be met in order to obtain funding, in Horizon Europe it will become a vital part of the project.
This will be translated into ensuring that funded projects will have a clear strategy on how they will present a credible, suitable and measurable dissemination and communication plan and guarantee that it will be executed during and after the project.
It was also made clear that as a solid strategy would improve the odds of obtaining funding, potential beneficiaries would have to outline their visibility plans in their proposals.
Clear strategy
A detailed dissemination and communication plan will have to be submitted within six months. The plan will need to be updated towards the end of the project (in longer projects also at the halfway point) and will have to guarantee that outcomes will continue to be disseminated after the project ends.
While in Horizon 2020 there was no requirement to continue promoting results beyond the duration of the project, beneficiaries will now be required to report their progress two years after the project has ended and again at the end of the fourth year.
Clearly, the commission is concerned that projects should demonstrate their results to both taxpayers and potential stakeholders, and that more projects will enter the commercialisation stage.
Need for expertise
One of the key conclusions of the webinar was that dissemination and communication experts should be an integral part of the consortium. Therefore, in Horizon Europe it won’t be enough to hire an independent expert to write the dissemination and communication part of the proposal. Beneficiaries who lack the professional expertise will have to add new members to their teams to help them in this area.
