There is a widening consensus that research and innovation (R&I) funding in Europe is not working the way it is supposed to. The growing competition for R&I project grants overburdens the R&I system, generates bursts of activity leading to unsustainable results, and fuels the much-maligned growth of precarious labour.

This trend needs to be turned around, and not by means of the usual patchwork but through a fundamental rethinking of the system for R&I funding. We believe that a very promising avenue for such a turnaround would be a shift from project-based funding to continuous funding for R&I networks.

Such a shift would have significant benefits, as it would drastically reduce the time spent on writing and reviewing grant proposals, make results much more sustainable, and largely eliminate precarious labour. It is not a catch-all solution that would replace all R&I funding, but would be a valuable addition to the current funding ecosystem. It could quite easily be tried out as a pilot and scaled up if proven successful.