Aligning Research and Innovation Funding to the Dynamics of Digital Commons
The EU’s research and innovation funding architecture favors short-cycle projects over the maintenance and governance work that keeps foundational digital infrastructure running. It prioritizes market-driven “disruptive” innovation, over supporting Digital Commons that can serve as genuine, sovereign alternatives to the dominant paradigm of technology development.
As a consequence, promising Digital Commons initiatives struggle to grow beyond the pilot stage and critical open source infrastructure remains chronically underfunded. This doesn’t happen because of a lack of value, but because the funding frameworks were not designed with commons-based production in mind.
This policy brief—the fifth in the Policy Building Blocks for Digital Commons series—proposes a layered funding model to align the Multiannual Financial Framework (2028–2034) with the realities of Digital Commons. It is part of Open Future’s work within the NGI Commons project.
The brief proposes two interconnected funding interventions:
- Public funding for maintenance of open source infrastructure—sustained, multi-year core funding for foundational open source components and the communities that steward them, structured along the lines of an EU Sovereign Tech Fund and potentially anchored within the Digital Commons EDIC
- Strategic funding for scale and competitiveness—tiered funding pathways that allow successful Digital Commons initiatives to graduate from prototypes to robust, deployment-ready infrastructure, using instruments that reward governance capacity and long-term sustainability alongside technical innovation
The brief argues for embedding Digital Commons and open source explicitly as strategic priorities across Horizon Europe and the European Competitiveness Fund. It also argues for eligibility and evaluation criteria that value openness, interoperability, and community stewardship rather than market-driven disruption alone.
