Call: Policy-development in the age of big data: data-driven policy-making, policy-modelling and policy-implementation

• Health, demographic change and wellbeing;
• Food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry, marine and maritime and inland water research, and the Bioeconomy;
• Secure, clean and efficient energy;
• Smart, green and integrated transport;
• Climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials;
• Europe in a changing world - inclusive, innovative and reflective societies;
• Secure societies - protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens.

This subprogramme will address social exclusion, discriminations and various forms of inequalities. It will explore new forms of innovation and strengthen the evidence base for the Innovation Union, the European Research Area and other relevant EU policies. It will promote coherent and effective cooperation with third countries. Finally, it will address the issues of memories, identities, tolerance and cultural heritage. The approach adopted in the present calls is in line with the Horizon 2020 Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) cross-cutting issue, engaging multiple actors including society, integrating the gender and ethical dimensions, ensuring the access to research outcomes. Some Topics deal specifically with formal and informal (science) education.

Europe is facing the need to identify the obstacles to and to find untapped sources of growth and employment, renewing the legitimacy of public policy-making, especially through greater citizens’ involvement, and of delivering better public services for all.

These issues need to be understood and addressed (cf. stronger evidence-base) in order for Europe to progress at socio-economic, political, educational and cultural levels, taking into account an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. An emerging approach for tackling many of these issues is to encourage creativity and collaboration between various societal actors through co-creation. It is therefore proposed to focus on co-creation for growth and inclusion: engaging citizens, users, academia, social partners, public authorities, businesses including SMEs, creative sectors and social entrepreneurs in processes that span from identifying problems to delivering solutions.

Proposals are invited against the following topics:

• Education and skills: empowering Europe’s young innovators
• User-driven innovation: value creation through design-enabled innovation
• Piloting demand-driven collaborative innovation models in Europe
• Applied co-creation to deliver public services
• Co-creation between public administrations: once-only principle
• Policy-development in the age of big data: data-driven policy-making, policy-modelling and policy-implementation
• Towards a new growth strategy in Europe - Improved economic and social measurement, data and official statistics
• Better integration of evidence on the impact of research and innovation in policy making
• A European map of knowledge production and co-creation in support of research and innovation for societal challenges

In order to enable governments - at all levels - to benefit from the availability of relevant data and thereby introduce and implement effective policies, new or improved methods and tools are needed to support and establish new types of evidence-informed policy design and implementation and to facilitate the interpretation of big data for public communication, including new outcome-based. For public administrations to experiment with the possibilities offered by big data – for example through policy modelling, monitoring, enforcing, simulation, testing, analysis and policy compliance – there is a need to thoroughly understand the legal frameworks and to take into account sociological, cultural, political, legal and economic as well as behavioural aspects. Proposals should also elaborate on the relationship between evidence-based policy-making and citizens’ participation, integrating the analysis of participatory elements.

Depending on the activity under this call, the general rule is that the required number of partners is between one and three legal entities each of which is established in a different EU Member State or Horizon2020 associated country.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU in the order of 0.5 million € would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. This does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts. 

Funding rate: 100%