Lund: Research offices across the Union are clearing their calendars for a heavy autumn, as the largest pool of open calls on the Union’s funding portal now sits under Horizon Europe. Roughly 600 calls are moving toward submission windows in the coming months, and universities, institutes and companies are already assembling the consortia they will need to compete for a share of the money.
The scale reflects a deliberate plan. The Commission adopted the main Horizon Europe work programme for 2026 and 2027 late last year, making about €14 billion available across the two years and committing at least 35% of that sum to climate goals. The programme spreads its calls across the three pillars that anchor the scheme, from frontier science through global challenges to breakthrough innovation, and across the Union’s flagship research missions.
Two new horizontal calls have caught particular attention. Together they mobilise €630 million, one stream aimed at industrial decarbonisation and the other at applying artificial intelligence to science itself, a pairing that signals where the Commission expects the next decade of competitiveness to be won. Researchers read the priorities as a map of what Brussels will pay for and shape their proposals accordingly.
For a research-heavy city like Lund, the calls mean opportunity and pressure in equal measure. Winning Horizon money brings prestige, jobs and the partnerships that keep a laboratory at the front of its field, yet success rates stay low and the paperwork is punishing. Small teams often struggle to match the administrative firepower of larger institutions that field professional grant-writing units.
That imbalance feeds a longer complaint. Scientists have argued for years that the programme’s bureaucracy swallows time that should go to research, and that chronic oversubscription leaves excellent proposals unfunded simply because the budget runs dry. The Commission says it has worked to simplify applications, though many applicants remain unconvinced that the burden has eased enough.
The debate also looks past 2027. As the Union designs its next research framework, universities and industry are lobbying hard for a bigger budget and a lighter touch, warning that Europe cannot close its innovation gap with the United States and China on the current terms. The outcome of that fight will decide how ambitious the successor to Horizon Europe can be.
For now, the immediate task is tactical. Teams are matching their ideas to specific topics, lining up partners across borders and racing the autumn deadlines listed on the Union’s Horizon Europe pages. The winners will help set the direction of European science, and the losers will regroup for the next round.
