EUA Council for Doctoral Education

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Aligning, acting and accelerating Europe’s research and innovation brings new challenges and opportunities for doctoral education

07 July 2025 | Manuel Heitor, University of Lisbon

Europe needs to continuously modernise doctoral education in close articulation with research and innovation. This will contribute to accelerating our collective response to geopolitical threats, boosting innovation in defence and security, and rethinking our understanding of ‘science for policy’ in times of knowledge abundance.

To this end, we must strengthen and reform our funding systems to promote greater risk-taking, faster decisions and institutional tolerance for failure. Doctoral education, together with the Choose Europe initiative to foster research careers, should be promoted without any hesitation and with adequate investment levels to turn the European brain drain to the United States of recent decades into a brain gain. The EU’s Strategy on Preparedness marks key steps in this direction, but requires Europe to better align, act and accelerate its research and innovation.

The context: new and complex uncertainty

Europe must better channel knowledge towards its strategic autonomy on the world stage. Building on the Letta, Draghi, Heitor and Niinistö reports of 2024, we now have a unique opportunity to advance doctoral education and contribute to this goal. Over three years into the war in Ukraine and with a new US administration in place, it is critically important to emphasise that Europe is the world’s most reliable partner – and the most efficient in terms of R&I outputs per resources, thanks to our diversity.

While investment capacities still lag behind, in a context of knowledge abundance we all face new challenges for ‘scientific activism’ to face uncertainty, together with four volatile and interactive aspects:

1. The fast rate of technological change in which we live, in a context of increasing abundance of knowledge and, above all, information, with the exponential growth of scientific publications on a global scale, including a new relevance of science produced and disseminated in China. This has stimulated new initiatives to search for ‘reliable knowledge’;

2. The growing fragmentation of multilateralism (i.e. the change of direction from globalisation to regionalisation), reinforced recently by policies of the new US government, together with discussions on the concept of strategic autonomy;

3. The accelerated social and political polarisation of societies, together with a relative weakening of democracies and the emergence of ‘me first’ behaviours in a demographic context that is growing and changing. This includes the need to prioritise young adults and better understand their ambitions; and

4. The emerging societal challenges associated with mental health, inequality in access to innovative biomedical treatments (especially for ‘non-curable diseases’), as well as the destabilising planetary pressures and inequalities of the Anthropocene, together with the search for comprehensive societal transformations to alleviate these pressures.

Doctoral education plays a critical role in this context. But its analysis and continuous evolution must take into account the work of the German sociologist Klaus Eder, together with that of Josef Henrich (2016), for whom learning is not the same as cultural evolution. Social learning does not change the world, but it provides the elements to change it. It promotes an increase in the evolution of behaviours, expanding the scope of possibilities for evolution. In other words, doctoral education and research, together with collaborative research and innovation, must be understood as a ‘cultural movement’ involving institutional innovations to address processes that stimulate generational change.

A proposal: align, act and accelerate R&I

To address this uncertain context, we all must consider three main changes that are foreseen in Europe, all of which will strongly influence doctoral education and research:

1. The priority given to defence as the main driver of EU competitiveness. This should be associated with a better articulation of R&I and doctoral education with the challenges Europe is facing, i.e. with increased investments that foster growth for innovative companies. Doctoral education and R&I are critical to strengthen EU defence and security, together with the concepts of prevention, preparedness and readiness. Similarly to the policies on the climate, nature and biodiversity crisis, Europeans need coherent policies to strengthen supply chains across Europe focusing on high added value products and systems to ‘escape the mid tech trap’ as identified by the French Nobel laureate Jean Tirole and his colleagues. The European Commission and national agencies should optimize the innovation dividend arising from the need for increased national security and defence expenditure by exploiting dual use both ways.

2. The need to better engage young generations, providing better jobs to guarantee a better future for them, alongside the Choose Europe This requires continuously modernising doctoral education and significantly increasing the interaction between academia, research and technology organisations (RTOs) and enterprises. The recent CESAER survey on research careers is very clear in this regard; and

3. The need to take more risks by accepting failures as steps to success. We certainly need to build on the experience of the European Research Council and the European Innovation Council, together with strong ‘mission-oriented collaborative research’, but we also need to experiment with new ways to assess and fund R&I, with decreased time to funding, decreased transaction costs and increased risks.

The challenge: a new public financial framework

To tackle these three major changes, we must understand that the EU can effectively act under threats, as demonstrated during the Covid-19 pandemic, and use lessons learned from that period to again develop major financial instruments. Furthermore, the need to spur public investment Europe requires a new approach to new European own resources.

Increasing R&I expenditure is highly significant for Europeans and our future. According to well-established OECD and Eurostat methodologies over the last 60 years, research expenditure is mainly characterised by human resources related expenditures, which account for about 90% of the total respective expenditure. Therefore, increasing investment in this vital field across the EU’s member states and regions over the next decade is associated with attracting and retaining doctoral researchers, together with three other critical issues: i) adequate salary levels; ii) modernising research careers; and iii) considerable expansion, structuring and modernisation of technical careers supporting R&I activities (i.e. S&T technicians and programme managers).

Note: This article is based on the author’s keynote speech on ‘Choose Europe – Challenges and opportunities for doctoral education to foster better jobs and research careers in Europe’ during the 2025 EUA-CDE Annual Meeting at the University of Lausanne.