Express your interest in joining the Community of Practice to shape future policy guidance
The European Commission is launching a Community of Practice to bring together R&I actors across Europe who are involved in generating, valorising or using multidisciplinary research and innovation results. The Community will exchange best practices on enabling conditions for valorisation and identify practical as well as structural solutions on how to strengthen the uptake and use of these results.
The Community of Practice will be kicked off in September and its work will be completed by early December 2026. It will include four online meetings and opportunities to share best practices. The ideas and experiences gathered through the Community will shape recommendations that will inform the future European Commission policy guidance on increasing the uptake of multidisciplinary research and innovation results.
This is part of European Research Area (ERA) policy agenda 2025-2027, notably the action ‘Upscaling knowledge valorisation capacities and activities’.
Why this matters
Multidisciplinary research and innovation helps turning knowledge into practical solutions that improve everyday lives and address societal and economic challenges. By integrating different fields of knowledge across disciplines and sectors, multidisciplinary research can provide new policy perspectives, human-centred innovations, business opportunities and more inclusive solutions.
Still, many existing valorisation approaches are better suited to STEM-based research, where routes from research results to application are often more established. This leaves an important gap to be addressed: the valorisation and uptake of multidisciplinary research results remain limited and need to be accelerated.
Background
The European Commission policy guidance will be informed by the recommendations from the Community of Practice and the outcomes of an ongoing study launched in September 2025. During the summer 2026, the European Commission will also publish a practical guidance for research projects to create better value from multidisciplinary research results, including Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) as an output from the study.
A key milestone in developing the practical guidance was an expert workshop held on 19 February 2026 in Brussels. It brought together more than 60 practitioners, researchers, university managers, funders and intermediaries from across the European research and innovation ecosystem. During the workshop, participants discussed stakeholder needs and tested practical tools designed to support future research and innovation projects with the valorisation of their multidisciplinary and SSH research results.
Read the workshop outcome report
See also
In November 2024, a stakeholder workshop on the uptake of multidisciplinary and SSH results was co-organised by the European Commission and Universities Denmark. To fully realise the innovative potential of these research fields, participants called on researchers, innovators and policymakers to further engage in dialogue and seek collaboration. There is a need to develop practical pathways and enabling and strengthen the enabling conditions that support multidisciplinary including SSH research results to create value.