A student’s reflections on an inspiring week By Anna Cherevko, current student in our 2023-2024 MPP cohort On 13-15 February 2024, a group of fellow students and I had the unique opportunity to visit Geneva – a city that is not only home to multiple United Nations entities, but also boasts the world’s highest density of international organizations, think tanks, and NGOs per capita. Organised by DEMOS (the student association of our Public Policy and Human Development master’s programme) and the ...
UNU-MERIT master’s students take their global development studies to the EU’s heart A guest post by Louis Géneau de Lamarlière, current student in our 2023-2024 MPP cohort and Communications Officer of DEMOS Many of us know Brussels as the heart of the EU, home to the European Parliament, European Council and Council of the EU. However, another lesser-known but no less significant role of the Belgian capital is its housing of many UN agencies and institutions. Last week (on 8 February), I had t...
Last week, the European Commission launched its European Research Area Policy Platform, aspects of which researchers from UNU-MERIT and Maastricht University worked on as part of a larger consortium. About the European Research Area Launched in 2000, the European Research Area (ERA) aims to create a single European market for research, innovation and technology that fosters the free movement of researchers, scientific knowledge and innovation. The overarching goal is to boost Europ...
When it comes to summarizing all that an institute as diverse as UNU-MERIT achieves in a year, where does one begin? Our work spans education programmes and capacity development efforts to media engagement and thought leadership to research projects big and small, and so much more. Nevertheless, we’ve done our best to give a snapshot of UNU-MERIT’s impact in 2023 through these five key contributions to sustainable development: Responded to the climate crisis Few parts of life fail t...
European Innovation Scoreboard 2023 released today The twenty-second edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS), which provides a comparative analysis of the research and innovation performance of EU Member States and selected third countries, was published today, 6 July 2023. The EIS presents and compares the relative strengths and weaknesses of countries’ research and innovation systems and helps policymakers assess areas in which they need to concentrate their efforts in ord...
A Q&A with innovation and technology policy expert Hugo Hollanders Few are better suited to discuss innovation policy at the pan-European level than Hugo Hollanders, Senior Researcher at UNU-MERIT and acting unit head of its Economics of Innovation and Technology Unit. For almost 25 years, Hollanders has been working with the European Commission (EC) on projects and reports as well as serving generally as a go-to expert on technology and innovation developments across the European Uni...
The European Commission has released the European Innovation Scoreboard 2022, which tracks innovation across the continent. It was prepared and coordinated by UNU-MERIT’s researchers Hugo Hollanders, Nordine Es-Sadki and Aishe Khalilova. The European Innovation Scoreboard provides a comparative analysis of innovation performance in EU countries, other European countries and regional neighbours. It assesses relative strengths and weaknesses of national innovation systems and helps countri...
A new report based on a Horizon 2020 monitoring exercise, featuring contributions from UNU-MERIT’s Ad Notten, confirms the continued progress of EU Open Science. With a steady increase over the years and an average success rate of 83% open access to scientific publications, the European Commission is at the forefront of research and innovation funders, concluded the consortium formed by the analysis company PPMI (Lithuania), research and innovation centre Athena (Greece) and Maastricht Uni...
Dr Katie Kuschminder has won a ‘Starting Grant’ from the European Research Council. Designed for postdocs with between two and seven years’ experience, the 1.5 million euro grant will enable Katie to form her own research team, which will focus on reintegration governance for migrants. Katie summed up her ‘Reintegrate’ project as follows: “Increasing numbers of people are returning to their origin countries after they migrate. This can be voluntary return or a...
Like so many other researchers sitting at home, watching the news about COVID-19, I have been impressed at how virologists, epidemiologists and other medical experts have caught the ears of national policymakers, business leaders and the general public. Suddenly, scientific facts and evidence bask in the trust of public opinion and fake news is once again ‘fake’ in the real sense of the word: unreliable, not to be trusted by anyone. Something climate experts have been dreaming of for decades, no...