Evaluation of the EU Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe programmes

The assignment

For several decades, the EU Commission has been supporting research and innovation in Europe, implemented by means of funding programmes “Horizon 2020” (2014–2020) and the successor programme “Horizon Europe” (2021–2027). A series of evaluation studies will now determine how well the funding programmes are working and where there may be room for improvement. Both the Horizon 2020 programme (completed in 2020) and Horizon Europe, scheduled to run until 2027, will be examined. The “Resilient Europe” study is one of these evaluation studies and runs in parallel with the “Innovative Europe” study, which Prognos is also involved in.

In the first 13-month phase, the Horizon 2020 programme pillars Societal Challenge 1 (health, demographic change and wellbeing), Societal Challenge 6 (Europe in a changing world - inclusive, innovative and reflective societies), Social Challenge 7 (secure societies - protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens) as well as various public-public and public-private partnerships are considered.

In the second phase of the project, Horizon Europe’s clusters of health, culture, creativity and inclusion, civil security and health-related partnerships will come under the microscope.

Prognos is responsible for the evaluation of the Active and Assisted Living (AAL) Partnership on behalf of the Public Policy and Management Institute (PPMI) in phase 1, including two integrated case studies. In addition, Prognos is conducting three further case studies on the topics of the International Medicines Initiative, International Programme-Level Cooperation, and Migration. The tasks for phase 2 have yet to be defined.

Our approach

The project team makes use of the following methods to evaluate the programmes:

• Desk research
• Interviews
• Publication analysis
• Patent analysis
• Text mining
• Network analysis
• Case studies

The evaluation project is planned from December 2021 to February 2024.

Project team: Daniel Gehrt, Dr. Stefanie Ettelt, Anja Breuer, Vera Fuhs, Anna Hornik, Salvatore Lauricella, Victor Wichmann