Final evaluation of Horizon 2020

The European Commission published the final evaluation of the Horizon 2020 programme at the end of January 2024. Horizon 2020 helped fund over 35,000 projects involving 40,000 organisations from around the world. The programme has also supported the mobility of almost 50,000 researchers and almost 4,000 patents and trademarks resulted from Horizon 2020 projects. Only four countries received half of all the funding, i.e. Germany, UK, France and Spain.

However, it was €159 billion short of being able to fund all proposals judged to be “above the quality threshold” in each call. In addition, and despite the introduction of Widening measures, the programme failed to close the research and innovation gap between Europe's top and bottom performers. Stronger measures are needed to support women researchers, entrepreneurs and innovators as well as to enable the wider dissemination, exploitation and deployment of results.

More information on the final evaluation can be found here: https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/knowledge-publications-tools-and-data/publications/all-publications/final-evaluation-horizon-2020_en