Wallonia's participation in European Research and Innovation instruments

In 2020, IDEA Consult assisted the Walloon regional authorities in redefining their regional innovation strategy (the famous Smart Specialisation Strategy or S3). In the wake of this, the regional authorities also selected IDEA Consult (in partnership with N-Able and independent experts Claire Nauwelaers and Alasdair Reid) to analyse Wallonia's participation in Europe and to identify measures to improve this participation.

The project will run from March to October 2021, when the first Horizon Europe calls are launched. Based on a detailed analysis of regional and European participation under Horizon 2020 (2014-2020), a long series of interviews with research actors (universities, accredited research centres, companies), intermediaries (clusters, competitiveness clusters) and support organisations (NCP-Walloon, NCP-FNRS, Digital Agency, SPW-Research etc.), international benchmarking with certain regions such as Flanders, the South of the Netherlands and the Bask Country, and several participative discussion workshops, IDEA Consult will have to analyse the possibilities to improve this access to European instruments, in line with the priority axes recently defined in the new S3.