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Edited by the D4 Project management association
Improved Human Resources in the Technological Research and Development Sector: the D4 project contribution
The new strategy of the European Commission, launched in Lisbon in 2000, focuses on the creation of a European Space that assigns a key role to research in the economic growth and social cohesion of the continent. From this point of view, human resources, their quality and their mobility take on strategic importance and their adaptation becomes crucial for the future requirements of European research.
Guaranteeing greater mobility of researchers is a primary objective in order to enable the effective transfer of knowledge and technology to the market. The mobility of researchers contributes to this osmosis, whilst also bringing a European dimension to their scientific career and encouraging the arrival of researchers from the rest of the world.
This is evidently an indispensable condition for the creation of a real European research market, able to compete with the most advanced countries, such as the United States and Japan. The creation of such a market could also help to invert the trend, in place for some time now, which sees many researchers leaving Europe, attracted by other countries that are able to cater better for their professional expectations.
During the European Council in Barcelona, in March 2002, the European Union set the objective of investing 3% of its gross domestic product in research by 2010. The current level is 2%, significantly below that of the United States (2.8%) and Japan (3%).
In order to contribute to achieving this result, the additional number of researchers to be trained was estimated at 700 thousand new units, bearing in mind that the number of researchers in Europe has not recorded a sufficient increase over recent years. In fact, the ratio of researchers to the working population has actually only risen from 5.4:1000 in 1999 to 5.7:1000 in 2001, still far behind the 8.1 in the USA and 9.1 in Japan. (...)
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