Created in 2005, the ANR is a public administrative establishment under the supervision of the ministry in charge of higher education and research. It funds and promotes fundamental and applied research, runs the State’s major investment programmes in the field of higher education and research as operator of France 2030, strengthens European and international scientific cooperation, and measures the impact of the funding it allocates. Around 1,700 new projects are selected every year through its Appel à projets générique, and more than 10,000 scientists took part in the selection of proposals submitted in 2024.
The State/ANR Contrat d’objectifs et de performance 2026-2030 (COP) raises the bar again. It is organised around structuring strategic priorities: strengthen the excellence and attractiveness of French research, boost French participation in European and international programmes, increase the contribution of research to innovation and partnerships, simplify and modernise project-based research, measure and strengthen the impact of the research funded, and promote responsible and open science.
Performance is an organizational question
Every one of those priorities lands in the same place: how the Agency’s teams actually work. Simplifying the life cycle of a project, accelerating contracting, running a rolling three-year action plan, producing impact analyses, and doing all of it in a constrained budgetary context is organizational work before it is anything else.
OpenDecide is used at the ANR to raise the effectiveness of its collectives, from the executive committee down to front-line teams. The point is not to add a programme on top of the COP. It is to give each team a shared, evidence-based read of how it operates, so that the objectives set at the top connect with the way work is done every day.
“The evaluation committee considers that the ANR is today among the best research funding agencies in Europe.”
AI in the service of ANR’s people
The COP commits the Agency to seizing the possibilities offered by AI, and states plainly that this drive is not aimed at reducing headcount. OpenDecide’s AI follows the same logic. It works on the organization itself, in the service of ANR’s people: helping their teams see what holds them back and act on it, so that the milestones and indicators of the COP 2026-2030 are met by collectives that function well.
Team deployment on the platform
Number of Agency teams, from the executive committee to front-line teams
The deployment is under way. More than 11 teams are on the platform today, with a target of 50 teams across the Agency.
Scientific excellence, carried by effective collectives
France’s scientific excellence rests on an agency able to select the best projects, get funding into laboratories quickly, and account for the impact of what it funds. That capability is collective before it is procedural.
By connecting its teams to the strategic plan and making their effectiveness visible and improvable, the ANR turns the COP 2026-2030 from a set of commitments into a working trajectory, one team at a time.