Process Engineering Renewal 2

4Research in Response to Societal Questions

Sustainability, and in particular climate change mitigation, is becoming a central tool to ensure our global competitiveness and the well-being of our citizens. That is why sustainability is truly a priority for our Presidency. Europe must seize the effects of research and innovation to differentiate the economy and develop the competitiveness of European industry. (Kulmuni 2019)

In Europe, there are around 3,000 higher education institutions and many other research organizations such as the CNRS in France, the Max Planck Gesellchaft and Helmholtz Gemeinschaft in Germany, the CNR in Italy and the CSIC in Spain. About half of all the Higher Education Institutions are considered ‘research active’ and around 850 award doctorates. These universities and research organizations employ around 900,000 public sector researchers. One should note also that much of the research funding available in Europe is institutional funding […]. Institutional funding can be formula-based, negotiated or historical. What that means is that in many European countries, project funding, defined as money attributed to a group or an individual to perform a research activity limited in scope, budget and time, is rather limited although the recent evolution has been in the direction of increasing it, unfortunately often correlated with a sharp decrease of recurrent funding […]. By contrast, in the US there are only around 400,000 public sector researchers and only ...