The European Commission has adopted the JRC’s Work Programme for 2016-2017, running under Horizon 2020, the current EU Framework Programme for funding research and innovation up to 2020. The key orientations of the JRC work programme reflect the 10 priorities set by the Commission’s agenda for jobs, growth, fairness and democratic change. In particular, the JRC will support a wide array of policy initiatives addressing economic growth, energy and climate, and migration.
The JRC’s activities across all policy areas will help identify synergies and trade-offs between policies and foster collaborative working. In particular, the JRC will support the Commission’s work on ‘better regulation’, which focuses on designing efficient polices and laws with minimum cost while avoiding overregulation. Being involved in all stages of the policy cycle, from design to implementation, the JRC is well placed to provide evidence for the improved quality of EU legislation.
In support of the Commission’s objective of improving the way it manages knowledge, the JRC will set up a number of pilot knowledge and competence centres in priority policy areas aimed at facilitating knowledge management across the Commission’s departments. While knowledge centres will create and structure internal and external scientific knowledge for a specific policy field or across policy fields, competence centres will bring together analytical expertise such as modelling or data mining which are independent of any theme, and can be applied across policy areas. A pilot knowledge centre for territorial policies is envisaged to be set up in 2016. As for the competence centres, they will be set up in the areas of microeconomic evaluation and modelling. A competence centre on composite indicators and scoreboards was launched on 3 February.