The European Commission claims not to monitor if research findings of EU-funded projects are applied to the market after they have ended, AlgorithmWatch found. As no EU institution seems to be responsible for checking on border security investments, it is hard to tell if the millions spent actually lead to technological innovation.
Despite the hundreds of millions spent on research and innovation projects in border security over the last decade, European Union institutions cannot say whether the results were brought to the market or actually deployed at EU borders.
While all such projects include detailed “exploitation strategies,” the EU Commission’s Research Executive Agency (REA), which manages research and innovation projects funded under the Horizon framework programs, holds no documents concerning their success or failure after a project’s end, AlgorithmWatch found through access to information requests to the agency.
REA replied that it could not share any documentation as “the right of access (…) applies only to existing documents in the possession of the institution” – and none of the documents we asked to disclose were in its possession. This means that the agency holds no final impact assessment reports that include information on whether and how project results were applied in real-world scenarios – neither case studies illustrating practical deployment of project results, nor monitoring and evaluation reports related to the uptake and commercialization of project results. The Horizon Results Platform is meant to be a tool that helps beneficiaries disseminate their exploitable key results and engage with relevant stakeholders. However, no patents or licensing agreements which would indicate commercialization or industrial application of border security project findings have been listed on the platform.
In a further request, we found out that “to REA’s knowledge, these documents do not exist, within REA or in other EU Institutions.” Patents could actually exist without REA being aware of them, as “unlike in case of procurements, the project results are owned by the beneficiary(ies) as consortium member(s) that generate(s) them.” As a result, the agency could only claim that “none” of the projects we inquired about “brought their technology to the market during its implementation (i.e. during the project duration).” If that is the case, do the project outputs have any effect at all?
According to the Annotated Model Grant Agreement for Horizon projects, project members must show their “best effort” to directly or indirectly exploit results within four years of a project’s end by “using them in further research activities,” “developing, creating or marketing a product or process,” “creating and providing a service,” or “using them in standardisation activities.” However, AlgorithmWatch could not find proof that any of this is actually monitored by EU institutions.
On the contrary, REA pointed out to us that, as a “granting authority” for the funded projects, it would not be legally obligated “to keep track of the exploitation of the results.” It did not indicate to what other EU institution this obligation was assigned.
Even if project findings were actually implemented somewhere, how would EU institutions know? “To my knowledge, the Commission only monitors the implementation of projects during the funding/grant award period and does not evaluate the overall impact and quality of the projects, or the take-up of the project outputs thereafter,” argues Ben Hayes, an independent expert who worked on the EU's research and innovation programs between 2010 and 2020.
“There’s certainly no obligation to monitor the impact of the project after the grant contract ends, though I imagine some form of ad hoc monitoring must take place,” Hayes told AlgorithmWatch. Yet, we could not find any factual indication that the Commission does so.
A purported lack of post-project monitoring might help hide project failures. Off-the-record descriptions of projects producing bad quality results after unrealistic and inflated promises are common. While our sources chose to remain anonymous, their accounts are at times reflected in official project documents. The currently ongoing anti-ID fraud project EINSTEIN, for example, draws on the premise that “a number of European innovation projects have tested new ways to combat fraud but few of them reached an operational level.”
Still, contrary to what REA told us, Border Violence Monitoring Network researchers found proof of post-project deployments for outputs of both the ANDROMEDA and NESTOR projects at the delta of the Evros river in Greece. Our own investigations found actual deployment of technological components developed in the D4FLY and EFFECTOR projects.
Some of the flagship EU surveillance systems could only be developed thanks to EU research and innovation projects. For example, the EU’s Common Information Sharing Environment (CISE), vital for information exchange between surveillance systems, was developed in part thanks to projects such as EU-CISE, PERSEUS, and SEABILLA. Even the EU’s forthcoming Entry-Exit System (EES) relies heavily on the outputs of the EU-funded ABC4EU project.
The 2025 Study on strengthening EU-funded security research and innovation, created by consulting firm Deloitte for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs (DG HOME), features a survey of stakeholders that participated in more than three research projects. The report concluded that “the vast majority of participants” indicated that “only some (66%, 81 respondents) or even none (9%, 11 respondents) research projects reached the market, were further developed or adopted by another organization.” 23% of stakeholders responded that “most of the projects reached the market.”
A 2022 report commissioned by DG HOME was even able to find “more than 50 examples of uptake success.” We do know that these include projects such as Smart-Trust, which was concluded in 2020 but is still relevant as it provided the building blocks for the “biometrics on-the-move” solutions that current projects such as CarMen and PopEye aim to further develop and deploy at EU borders. The report claims that its conclusions are based on the “initial provision of internal DG HOME documentation.” This seems to indicate that, contrary to what REA told AlgorithmWatch, some documentation of project uptakes must indeed exist. Wouldn’t it be strange otherwise? Any institution that grants millions to fund a research project must have an interest in it. But then one would expect it to want to be informed about potentially useful project outcomes. It must be interested in getting something out of it. If REA only gives out grants, there has to be some EU instance to evaluate if the investment was worth it. Which is it? Why is it so difficult to get access to the research results and such assessments?
Want to learn more about EU-funded experiments at our borders? Read our long-read article:
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