On Tuesday 31 March, the EU Member States’ research ministers will hold an informal virtual meeting to discuss the EU’s potential for innovation.
Initially scheduled to take place face-to-face in Cyprus, the meeting will now be held online, due to the outbreak of war in the Middle East (see EUROPE 13822/4).
It will begin at 9.30am with a keynote speech and continue with a policy debate entitled ‘From Research Excellence to Global Scale: Unlocking Europe’s Innovation Potential’. In recent months, a number of initiatives have been launched to address this issue: on the one hand, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has launched the ‘Choose Europe for Science’ project aimed at attracting scientists and researchers from all over the world to Europe to make it a hotbed of innovation (see EUROPE 13631/10); secondly, the Member States adopted their conclusions on the importance of research and innovation in the EU’s strategy for start-ups and scale-ups (see EUROPE 13720/13).
The meeting will end at around midday. (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)