 Minister Moden Östergård, today you have received the old declaration. What will be your next step? Well now I meet with my colleagues at the end of May to hopefully agree on the consent of the new framework programme. And there the declaration will be a strong signal that the excellent needs to be the guiding principle also in the years ahead for the common European research policy. So I think that my colleagues will be impressed with the work here when I show them the declaration and then we'll go into the negotiations. But how will you make sure that the 80 billion euros will actually lead to excellent research and not least the expected growth in Europe? Well first of all we have seen a proposal from the Commission where the ERC that was a new aspect in the last framework programme has been proposed to be enlarged very much budget wise. And I think I sense a strong support for that across the countries. And second of all I think it's important to stress that excellent is not only for basic research but also when we're tackling societal challenges we need to make sure that excellence is the guiding principle because only if we develop the best solutions to the societal challenges then it will actually lead to jobs and growth in Europe. President of the European Council Helga Nebotni, does Europe have research talents enough to invest in so that we can ensure that the 80 billion euros are well spent? My answer is a definite yes because we see young talented researchers all over Europe. And what we see from the perspective of the European Research Council in particular is that over the five years that we have now been running there is no decline in quality of applications rather the contrary. There is an expansion of number of applications with the quality the same or even higher. And what will the European Research Council's strategy for the ERC grant be, prospectively? We do not intend to change in any dramatic way what we are doing now. So we will continue to fund starting grantees. This means from two to twelve years after the PhD and we will continue to fund advanced grantees. What we have recently added is a small scheme called proof of concept for those ERC grantees who work on ideas that can have a potential for commercialization. We provide them with means to either draw up a business plan or to investigate about intellectual property rights so we give them some starting aid to take their ideas further towards market but then others have to take up. And the other scheme that we have recently added on an experimental basis is the so-called synergy grant. And the synergy grant we have has met with a lot of interest, 700 applications. In the end our budget allows us only to fund some 15 but it shows the idea meets the demand of the scientific community. And the idea is a very simple one, two to four people who have an ERC profile can come together to work on an idea that they can implement only in this particular configuration. So we want to give them space and time to think and work together but again bottom-up. And I'm quite sure that there will be many interesting topics that go in the direction of the grant challenges but it's a bottom-up process. Rector of Aarhus University and host of the Excellence Conference, Lowitz-Holl-Nielsen, Aarhus University has succeeded in obtaining a high number of ERC grants. Can we expect that the universities will receive even more grants for free research in the future? No, we cannot because we want the ERC to select the very best candidates for grants but we hope. And just two numbers, when I was a student at this university many, many years ago it had 4,000 students. Nowadays we have 40,000 students and we have about 4,000 doctoral students and post-doctoral students. Out of those 4,000 very, very selected and good brains I'm sure some of them will be competitive and also compete for ERC grants. So I'm confident but I want to underscore that ERC should have excellence as its goal and select based on the very best proposals and do their best to find the best minds from wherever in Europe or outside of Europe for that matter they come. You have been a significant part of the declaration. What is your hope for the future of the declaration? My hope for the future, I'm very optimistic in fact because I think when I came back to Europe in 2005 from the United States I saw that we had lack of optimism. I still feel a bit we lack optimism in Europe but I also see life. I think we are getting more and more of the strong forces to formulate policies and also to make the right selections and so forth. We have a lot of strength and I see a bright future for Europe as one of the cornerstones of the global knowledge economy. So in that sense I'm very optimistic. I'm also optimistic because a university like this one is a very young university and we are doing I believe a good job for Europe and many other universities can do the same. So I don't see why we shouldn't be optimistic and in fact also face the competition from the US and China and other continental countries. Why be shy?