The 2013 Action Plan for the Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, CSIC), published in the CSIC's Official Journal, envisages a reorientation of the Fundación General CSIC’s role as an instrument of the CSIC to facilitate contacts between businesses and social partners interested in promoting knowledge transfer and to enable them to work together to benefit Spanish society.
Thus, section 3.10 of the 2013 Action Plan, under the heading "New orientation of the FGCSIC," defines the foundation's role as being that of a pre-competitive knowledge transfer platform serving the CSIC. As such, its role is to collaborate on transferring knowledge generated by the CSIC to the science and technology system as a whole, and to give social and economic value to the organisation's research output by helping raise its profile in the economy and society in Spain and abroad. The FGCSIC will therefore work in coordination with the CSIC in an effort to overcome the Spanish R&D system’s relatively limited ability to generate economic and social value, widely recognised to be one of its main shortcomings, while addressing the major social challenges and responding to business and technology needs, from an international perspective.
