The Feedback to Policy activity for MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships focused on assessing the non-academic placement, introduced as a new opportunity under Horizon Europe. It was carried out internally by a joint team from the Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture (EAC) and the European Research Executive Agency (REA) working on the MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships.

The MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships and its predecessor MSCA Individual Fellowships under Horizon 2020 have always had a lower participation of non-academic organisations compared to the other MSCA actions. The non-academic placement was therefore introduced under Horizon Europe to further foster intersectoral mobility of MSCA postdoctoral fellows, to expose them to different sectors outside academia and to stimulate innovation and knowledge transfer. While the participation of the non-academic sector in MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships has increased in Horizon Europe compared to Horizon 2020, only few proposals and funded projects include a non-academic placement.

The objectives of the Feedback to Policy activity were to investigate both motivations and barriers for including a non-academic placement in a MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships’ proposal and review the experience of fellows with their placement so far.

Barriers

• There is notably a need to continue to widely promote the non-academic placements to all potential applicants, as many current fellows were not aware of this opportunity or were made aware too late to include it in their proposal.
• Another difficulty encountered by fellows who wish to include a non-academic placement in their proposal is finding a host. Steps could be taken to further support fellows in this process of looking for a non-academic placement host, including promoting existing resources (e.g. Enterprise Europe Network, MSCA Matchmaking platform, etc.) but also exploring the possibility of making available a list of previous placement hosts to help applicants to identify potential partners. Targeted promotion of the placement opportunity to companies would also help to highlight the benefits of hosting a fellow and address some of their concerns.

Recurring challenges encountered with the implementation of the placement, including administrative hurdles, organisational and financial issues, particularly for researchers with a placement in a different country from their main host institution:

• Partnership agreements between the main fellowship host and any associated partner, like the placement host, are important to set the conditions for the collaboration during the placement, including hosting conditions, transfer of funds for the researchers’ activities or intellectual property rights for outputs stemming from the placement activities.
• Ultimately, project participants have also indicated that the placement rules currently offer limited flexibility during the implementation of the fellowship to adapt the placement to the project and the researcher’s needs and to address any implementation challenges that can occur. The fellows’ feedback includes suggestions for changes to improve the flexibility of the placement and the overall experience.

These suggestions will feed into the broader reflection on the future of the MSCA programme and the MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships action in the next EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, notably to further promote intersectoral mobility for postdoctoral researchers.