The second edition of the Partnership Stakeholder Forum, 5-6 Dec in Brussels, is less than 2 weeks away. We are pleased to announce that Commissioner Iliana Ivanova will open the Forum with a keynote speech.

The event will bring together the whole community of European Partnership stakeholders to discuss policy and practical aspects related to European Partnerships. It will furthermore provide a venue for networking, broadening engagement and sharing of experiences.

Building on the 2022 edition of the Forum, which was very successful, this year the event will deliver on the following objectives:

• Review the state of play of implementation of the European Partnerships launched under the first Strategic Plan, as well as a look at the interim evaluation of Horizon Europe.
• Present and discuss the enlargement of the partnerships portfolio under the Second Strategic Plan.
• Have a first exchange of views with the community at large on European Partnerships in the next Framework Programme.

The European Commission and ERA-LEARN are co-organising this forum as a physical event with the possibility to follow the plenary sessions in live-streaming.

Please register and indicate if you will attend physically. The ERA-LEARN team will confirm your registration.

The European Commission with support of ERA-LEARN is planning on organising two meetings in the interest of European Partnerships, early next year:

• A webinar (online) on issues that the co-funded European Partnerships are currently facing regarding the definition and implementation of additional activities beyond joint calls. Estimated date: late January or early February.
• A technical workshop (physical) on the administrative burden of European Partnerships. Estimated date: March/April.

The webinar will be focused on informing the Partnerships and elaborate on specific current issues. The technical workshop will be interactive with the objective of reflecting on the administrative burden that European Partnerships are facing.

More information on these two events will follow.

The European Court of Auditors (ECA) has given a clean bill of health to all the accounts of the EU's Joint Undertakings (JUs) it audited this year. The auditors confirm the positive results of previous audits, but they also warn of some rough waters ahead. They stress the need to complete projects from the previous funding cycle, to bring private members' contributions up to agreed targets and to address some recruitment and management weaknesses.

The ECA has also published its annual report on EU Joint Undertakings for the financial year 2022.

The Horizon Europe Regulation states that every Partnership needs to develop a phasing-out strategy. Nevertheless, the activities of the partnerships and the attainment of their objectives should go beyond the availability of Union funding. The aim of the workshop, that took place on 21 September in Brussels, was to initiate a reflection on the phasing-out strategies of European partnerships and to elaborate potential future scenarios in the best interest of their members and of the EU. Slides and minutes are now available for download.

The recently published opinion of the Partnership Knowledge Hub (PKH) on the second batch of European Partnerships aims at giving advice to the European Commission on the selection of new candidate partnerships under the second Strategic Plan of Horizon Europe, notably on the interpretation and the relevance of Horizon Europe selection criteria for Partnerships, as well as the relevance of additional issues to be considered in the selection process, on lessons learnt from the selection process of the first batch of European Partnerships, and on how to better design the selection process for European Partnerships.

ERA-LEARN provides a database of research & innovation partnerships, including European Partnerships under Horizon Europe as well as Public-Public and Public-Private partnerships under previous Framework Programmes. It is the heart of the ERA-LEARN services. We offer its use across initiatives and provide data down to the level of Calls and funded Projects. All transnational calls which are currently open are compiled into one specific call calendar.

The database filter functions have now been revised to optimise their use. The filtering of partnerships and calls by organisations and countries involved is now more granular. In addition, it is now possible to filter by participation of associated or by third countries (according to Horizon Europe). The organisation details and the country overview have also been improved.

ERA-LEARN has published several specific 'country reports' which provide an analysis of their participation and attempt to explain a country's 'performance' in European Partnerships within the context of its own national and regional research and innovation systems. The aim of the country reports is to provide an overall picture of a country's performance in terms of participation in European Partnerships, compared not only with the EU14, EU13 and EU27 averages, but also with the performance of a group of peer countries with similar research and innovation profiles. It is hoped that these reports will be useful not only to organisations within the country of interest, who may have only a fragmented picture of the situation, but also to organisations in other countries who wish to learn the reasons for the 'position' of a particular country and/or to learn from the exemplary performance of other countries.

Reports are available for the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Poland, Spain