Wallonia | Business environment | R&D
The backbone of economic growth is research. It provides a constant source of technical progress, as well as innovation and employment opportunities, and plays an important role in enhancing healthcare, enriching our cultural heritage and promoting overall social cohesion and well-being.
BASIC and applied research
In an effort to optimise the public research and innovation sector, the Wallonia Region and the French Community have progressively established synergies within the framework of their respective competencies. In acknowledgement of the role it plays in creating knowledge and expertise, they have increased the budgetary resources allocated to basic research.
This increased budget will allow the implementation of the FNRS development plan within the framework of a multiannual plan.
Applied research is also actively promoted with the aim of making it an integral part of the regional restructuring process. This is achieved by ensuring that it is market-focused and geared towards the development of new products and the industrial exploitation of research results.
Three main focus points have been defined in order to enhance the part played by research and innovation in the development of knowledge and expertise and to ensure that Wallonia, Brussels Capital and the French Community play a key role in the European Research Area: Integration, transversality and internationalisation.
Integration
There are different administrative structures for R&D in the French Community and in the Wallonia Region. Integrating these structures will make R&D measures and actions more efficient and will allow the needs of research, business and the general Wallonia economy to be addressed more effectively. A systematic research monitoring system will be set up, and will incorporate quantitative and qualitative indicators similar to those used at European level.
The relaunch of the PROMETHEE programme has made important contributions in this area, and has identified a limited number of key technologies and research priorities, which will be defined in medium-term framework programmes.
These priorities already include the following:
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To promote health-related biotechnology, information technology and communications, materials science and nanotechnology, |
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To harmonise economic and technology-based coordination strategies and establish research and industry clusters by exploiting MERIT evaluation results, |
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To develop a support strategy aimed at enhancing the exploitation of research results, |
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To consolidate the various tools developed by the Wallonia Region for identifying exploitable results, transferring technology and creating spin-off companies. |
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To increase the financial resources available to research centres. |
Transversality
Transversality involves consolidating synergies and partnerships within the framework of a common policy between the Wallonia and Brussels-Capital region and the French Community.
The strategy involves identifying and strengthening partnerships between the Regions and the Community on the basis of the universities and colleges of higher education, research centres and innovative businesses. The following are examples of planned actions:
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To open up doctoral schools to researchers, |
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To improve the efficiency of the First programmes, |
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To offer companies the opportunity to finance doctoral theses, |
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To encourage the mobility of researchers, both geographically and between the worlds of industry and academia. |
Internationalisation
This involves promoting interregional and international research collaboration by means of the following:
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Strengthening administrative units in order to improve the technical and scientific administration of important research projects, |
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Reviewing the support system for clusters, |
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Setting up joint Wallonia – Brussels projects, |
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Developing bilateral and multilateral cooperation with other Regions or States, |
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Establishing a Wallonia – Brussels focus area for European aerospace projects. |
Research Funding
There are three main sources of financing for basic research:
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Community funding, mostly provided at FNRS, FSR and ARC level, |
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Federal funding with development schemes, inter-university development focus areas (PAI); |
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European funding within the scope of successive Framework Programmes. |
The funding of applied research falls under the responsibility of the Wallonia Region and is mainly organised through specific programmes aimed at either universities and research centres within the scope of incentive programmes, or at individual companies in the form of refundable advances or feasibility studies.
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The Wallonia Region also offers programmes aimed at the funding of research mandates within the framework of the FIRST Programmes (companies, doctorates, Europe Objective 1 and Objective 3)
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Research and the development of smes
 3% target
One of the primary concerns of the Minister for Research and New Technologies relates to the European recommendations agreed by the Council of Europe in Barcelona 2002. These recommendations set out an R&D investment target of 3% of the country’s GDP, of which 1% is to be financed by public funds. Research will be playing a more important role in the investment budgets of the French Community and the Wallonia Region.
As a step towards fully meeting its commitments in this area, one of the main objectives of the Wallonia Government is to considerably increase funding in R&D.
Transfer of technology The Wallonia Region has implemented high-performance tools for universities and research centres, which are already proving successful. These tools focus on protecting research results from the initial stage of discovery. They also focus on enhancing the transformation of research results into useful tools for deployment in companies and the development of tools aimed at transferring new technologies, innovations, and their industrial application.
Academics and research directors in the French Community are increasingly aware that research should be viewed as a business activity in its own right, and that it should play an integral role in the process of developing new products and processes, and in the emergence of spin-off companies.
Performance indicators for the exploitation of research
The universities and colleges of higher education use three performance indicators that can also be used in research centres.
These indicators demonstrate the impact of R&D activities on the economic growth potential of the Wallonia Region and the French Community.
These indicators are as follows:
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Patents, which protect intellectual property and allow the economic exploitation of a specific innovation. This protection allows the establishment of research partnerships with companies, the granting of licenses and the creation of spin-offs. |
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The creation of spin-offs. These fledgling companies are set up on the back of university research in order to ensure the industrial or commercial exploitation of expert knowledge or a specific innovation. |
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The direct transfer of technology, within the framework of direct, mutually beneficial agreements between companies and universities. |
Intermediation
Apart from guiding universities and research centres through the process of transferring research results to companies and assisting with the integration of these results, intermediation also involves relaying the technological needs of the companies back to the universities and research centres.
Intermediation involves three main roles: Research exploitation coordinators, Technology transfer coordinators, Research interface coordinators
The "Research exploitation coordinator" is attached to a university institution, and his role is to identify research results that are suitable for potential industrial exploitation. Research exploitation coordinators are responsible for protecting the intellectual property rights of the research results and for preparing the transfer of these results to the specified company.
Working in their specific area of expertise within the research centre, the role of the "Technology transfer coordinator" involves working closely with the company on transferring the technology associated with the specific innovation.
The role of "Research interface coordinator" involves identifying the requirements of companies and relaying these back to the relevant bodies for feedback.
When it comes to intermediation, the Wallonia Region can be viewed as a vast laboratory which tests all types of formulas, producing different results each time. Intermediation plays an integral role in no less than 50 structures in the Wallonia region. These range from university interface bodies to support bodies for research and innovation.
Industrial clusters have also been developed within the framework of the PROMETHEE programme and have proven an important innovation interface between companies, universities and research centres.
Key players
Universities and colleges of higher education
Most of the basic research and a substantial part of the applied research that takes place in Wallonia is carried out at its nine university centres.
Today, universities spend 25% of their operational budgets on research. Most of their research funding comes from contracts with the FNRS, the DGTRE, or the European Commission, usually in response to project tenders.
Approved research centres in Wallonia
The decree of July 5, 1990 defines research centres in the following terms: Research structures or bodies created either at the initiative of the Wallonia Region, or at the initiative of and for deployment in a specific sector or consortium. These centres are key players when it comes to applied research and the transfer of technology to companies based in Wallonia.
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List of collective research centres
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