The European Commission’s public consultation on the future European Partnerships under Horizon Europe 2028–2034 closed on 16 October. The consultation was part of the preparation of a new partnership portfolio that should better support Europe’s strategic priorities, competitiveness, and industrial transformation.
Working on CLIC Innovation’s feedback, I kept returning to one fundamental question: Are we designing European Partnerships around technology areas and established sectoral boundaries, or around the transformations Europe needs to achieve?
The Commission’s emerging partnership portfolio already recognizes the importance of collaboration across sectors and value chains, stronger links between research and deployment, and the integration of cross-cutting priorities.
However, several proposed partnership areas still reflect these established boundaries. Their strategic missions should be defined more clearly by the system transformations Europe needs to achieve.
Europe’s competitiveness is also a systems challenge
Europe is facing several major and interconnected challenges. Industrial competitiveness, climate neutrality, biodiversity loss, security of supply, strategic autonomy and resilience all require substantial changes in the way our energy, industrial and resource systems function.
The green and digital transitions add another dimension to these challenges. They are closely connected, and their impacts extend across industrial sectors and infrastructures. Achieving these objectives simultaneously involves difficult trade-offs, particularly between costs, security of supply and sustainability.
A key challenge for European research and innovation is to develop system solutions that reduce these trade-offs and improve the overall competitiveness of the European industry.
Europe’s industrial competitiveness needs to be understood beyond the production costs of individual technologies or products. It also depends on the performance of the underlying energy, industrial and infrastructure systems, including their efficiency, reliability, resilience, security of supply and environmental and social sustainability. Even with excellent technologies, companies may struggle to manufacture competitively or invest in Europe if the energy, infrastructure and supply chains they depend on are too costly or unreliable. Improving security of supply and sustainability may also increase costs, creating trade-offs between immediate costs and longer-term economic, strategic and societal value.
Europe has strong scientific, technological, and industrial capabilities. The challenge is to bring these capabilities together to develop competitive, sustainable, and resilient systems that support Europe’s wider strategic and societal goals.
Why European Partnerships need systemic RDI
Technological development remains essential. At the same time, many barriers to industrial transformation arise from uncertain long-term demand, immature markets, infrastructure dependencies, fragmented value chains, investment risks, and regulatory conditions.
Developing individual technology to commercial maturity does not necessarily mean that its industrial deployment is economically viable. New infrastructure may depend on future industrial demand, while investment in industrial applications may depend on infrastructure that does not yet exist. Market development and investment decisions are interconnected across entire value chains.
This is where systemic research and innovation are becoming increasingly important.
We need solutions that address technological, economic, societal, and governance challenges together. Radical system innovation can also emerge from new combinations of existing technologies, infrastructure, business models and operating practices, fundamentally changing how systems function even when the individual technologies are mature.
European Partnerships can help develop and test such solutions through long-term collaboration among industry, research organizations, public authorities, funding bodies, and other relevant actors.
What would this mean for future partnerships?
This perspective should guide the strategic missions of future European Partnerships. We should start with the system transformations and related RDI needs to identify the technologies, competencies, and actors required.
In our feedback, CLIC Innovation proposed stronger strategic framings for two partnership areas included in the Commission’s emerging portfolio.
Hydrogen-enabled Energy and Industrial Transformation
The Commission’s emerging partnership area, Scaling up Hydrogen and advanced sustainable fuels (including energy intensive industries) already covers important industrial applications, infrastructure and circular carbon. However, its placement under Energy and its grouping of hydrogen with sustainable fuels risk underplaying hydrogen’s wider role in strategic industrial value chains and security of supply.
For example, hydrogen is essential for ammonia production and thus for nitrogen fertilizers, linking hydrogen availability to European food security and security of supply. Hydrogen can also enable the production of renewable chemical feedstocks and the utilization of circular carbon. These applications depend on energy markets, industrial demand, infrastructure, and investment conditions across several value chains and sectors.
We therefore propose Hydrogen-enabled Energy and Industrial Transformation as a stronger strategic framing. Hydrogen-derived fuels would remain part of this mission, while advanced biofuels should be considered within a broader future bioeconomy and biomanufacturing mandate.
The partnership’s strategic RDI agenda should address hydrogen technologies and value chains together with market formation, long-term demand, infrastructure coordination, and investment conditions. Its ecosystem should include industrial users, infrastructure operators, and other relevant actors beyond the established hydrogen technology community.
The wider transformation of energy-intensive industries extends beyond hydrogen and requires clear RDI responsibilities across the future partnership portfolio.
Integrated Energy and Industrial Systems
The Commission’s proposed energy partnership recognizes renewable energy technologies, grid flexibility, energy efficiency, and sector coupling. Its overall framing nevertheless remains largely focused on renewable electricity and grid management.
Europe needs to develop integrated energy and industrial systems in which electricity, heating and cooling, hydrogen, other renewable gases, storage, infrastructure networks, and industrial processes are planned and optimized together.
We propose Integrated Energy and Industrial Systems as a stronger strategic mission.
A good example is the growing role of data centers. Their increasing electricity demand affects energy infrastructure, grid capacity, and system costs. At the same time, data centers can provide opportunities for demand flexibility, waste heat recovery, and more efficient energy system operation. Addressing these interdependencies requires joint RDI across digital technologies, energy systems, infrastructure, and industrial applications.
The partnership should develop solutions for integrated system planning and operation, coordinated infrastructure development, interoperability, flexibility, and digital and AI-enabled system optimization. The hydrogen partnership would focus on hydrogen-specific technologies and industrial value chains, while the energy partnership would address their integration into wider energy and industrial systems.
Strategic missions should guide partnership ecosystems
A broader system transformation perspective does not mean that Europe should create a few very large partnerships covering everything.
Each partnership needs a coherent strategic RDI mission. Where challenges extend across partnership boundaries, responsibilities and joint RDI priorities should be clearly defined.
For example, the generation and capture of biogenic CO₂ in bio-based industries, using captured CO₂ together with hydrogen to produce chemicals and fuels, and the development of wider CO₂ infrastructure and utilization pathways involve related but distinct RDI responsibilities. These should be addressed through coordinated agendas across the relevant partnerships.
The same applies to circularity, societal perspectives, and other cross-cutting priorities. Where these dimensions are important to the intended transformation, they should be integrated directly into partnership missions, capabilities, and research agendas.
This also means that the strategic mission should determine the competencies and actors needed in a partnership.
Existing European Partnerships and Joint Undertakings have built valuable industrial networks, governance capabilities, and long-term collaboration. We should build on these strengths while enabling partnership ecosystems to evolve as their strategic missions develop.
For particularly complex system transformations, the institutional continuity and joint strategic governance offered by a Joint Undertaking may provide important added value. The appropriate implementation model should be selected according to the requirements of the mission.
From RDI to investment and impact
The strategic RDI agendas of European Partnerships should be developed in dialogue with industrial users, policymakers, infrastructure operators, investors, and other actors who influence the conditions for implementation.
Partnerships can study how regulation, markets and societal acceptance shape industrial deployment, and develop and test new approaches to market formation, business and investment models, system integration and ecosystem coordination in real industrial and societal environments. Lessons from large-scale demonstrations should systematically inform future RDI priorities.
Partnerships cannot deliver entire transitions themselves. Policy, regulation, market development, and investment decisions are shaped by different actors with distinct responsibilities. The role of RDI partnerships is to develop the knowledge, innovations, and capabilities that help make these transformations possible.
My main recommendation is simple: Start from Europe’s strategic and societal challenges. Identify the system transformations and RDI needs they create. Then define coherent partnership missions, responsibilities and ecosystems around those needs.
This would help Europe develop more competitive energy and industrial systems, strengthen its attractiveness for industrial investment, and create lasting economic and societal value.
Header picture: Canva
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