Opportunity for the HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ERA-01-61 funding call

Supporting and giving recognition to citizen science in the European Research Area

Deadline:

September 23, 2021

Project types:

  1. HORIZON-CSA HORIZON Coordination and Support Actions

Project Proposal

The call HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ERA-01-61 has been scheduled to close, so this opportunity is no longer current.

One of our core areas of expertise is to help set up experimental projects and evaluate them through randomised controlled trials (RCTs). Thematically, our work is focused on several related policy areas: innovation, entrepreneurship, SMEs and productivity, and we have an interest in different types of projects (such as undertaking research on novel policy instruments, facilitating peer learning, running capacity building programmes, using big data to map ecosystems, or supporting experimentation funds).

While we have an interest and do work on many projects that don't involve RCTSs or experimentation (including EU funded projects), for this specific opportunity we are looking to join a consortium that someone else is leading and become the experimentation/learning partner.

A key condition for us joining a consortium for this call is that the partner leading the implementation of the programme is supportive of experimentation and, specifically, that is interested in (or open to) introducing some form of randomisation in the delivery of the interventions. This may include using a lottery to decide who can/cannot participate in the programme, or to use lotteries to allocate participants to different intervention designs, and test which one is more effective. Some of these experiments may be testing small tweaks in the delivery of the intervention (e.g., A/B testing in messaging trials) while others may be testing radically different intervention designs.

The EC has signaled that they would like to see more experimentation and better evidence in EU funded projects (for instance calling for more policy experimentation in their recent ERA communication or issuing a specific funding call for RCTs in innovation policy). We believe that our participation can help add this valuable perspective to a consortium and contribute to the success of the bid.