This is the main investment of the plan aimed at the core of the Spanish System of Science, Technology and Innovation (SECTI): the research activity. The investment includes a new generation of public calls for grants and subsidies aimed at reforming the SECTI, strengthening the transfer of knowledge and public-private collaboration.
This investment is intended to generate an intense offer of research projects for Spanish R&D&I groups and for them to collaborate with companies.
This investment, of more than 1,000 million euros, will mobilize the research and innovation community in Spain to:
- Intensify its research and innovation activity.
- To promote the transfer of research results to society, with emphasis on collaboration with companies.
- Focus the activities on strategic lines, such as the green and digital transition.
- Increase the presence of Spanish research groups in international competitive calls.
The planned calls for proposals are as follows:
- A new call for proof-of-concept projects: to finance projects that accelerate the transformation of ideas, knowledge or scientific results into products, goods, applications or benefits for the economy, society, culture, public policies or services. The activities will be aimed at making progress in the early stages of the pre-competitive development of an idea and facilitating its practical application.
- A new call for interdisciplinary projects in strategic lines that will finance public-private consortiums and whose strategic lines of action have been selected based on their contribution to the recovery of the crisis, the competitiveness of Spanish actors in the international context and the ability to achieve a position of international leadership.
- A new call for research projects on the green and digital transition: to finance projects developed by public sector researchers and private non-profit research entities, which will aim to implement the ecological and digital transition.
- Call for Public-Private Partnership projects, “Partnership Challenges”: it is planned to strengthen this call (which has been carried out for other years) by adding resources to promote public-private collaboration in the context of R+D+I.
- Call for International Collaboration Projects: It will allow the financing of SECTI research and innovation groups that are part of cross-border joint programming projects selected for funding by the Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 partnerships, such as the ERA-Net cofund, the initiatives created under Article 187 and 185 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and the partnerships established in the Horizon Europe Framework Programme. The MRR funds included in this call will serve to supplement the funding given for the implementation of R+D+I activities in the context of all these partnerships under Horizon Europe and/or Horizon 2020.
- Convocatoria de proyectos de I+D de vanguardia orientada a retos de la sociedad: Missions for Science and Innovation: major strategic initiatives of pre-competitive research, carried out by a group of companies, with relevant participation of research bodies, technology centers and universities, which aim to contribute to the development of previously identified thematic missions.
On the other hand, one of the most powerful tools to promote the transfer of knowledge is the figure of pre-commercial public purchase. Pre-commercial public procurement is a tool to promote innovation from the public sector, through the tender of R&D services for the development of technology that can serve for the future provision of better public services. They are actions in areas where Spanish entities have demonstrated the ability to move quickly to a real environment with high-potential technological singularities (green energy and its hybridization with energy vectors of future and high scalability), and where European capacities are clearly improving and Spanish public-private knowledge presents relevant advances (new space and its access to space, new treatment systems in nuclear medicine with high portability, biodegradable batteries, high-efficiency submarine systems, etc. ). Pre-commercial public procurement encourages the transfer of knowledge generated in the public sphere to the private sector.
The goal set out in the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan is to fund more than 3,000 research projects.
