Positive Outcome Of Swiss Participation In 6th EU Framework Programme

By Ulrika Lomas, for LawAndTax-News.com, Brussels

14 July 2008

The Swiss State Secretariat for Education and Research has recently published a report analysing Switzerland's participation in the 6th EU Framework Programme.

This report shows that Swiss research activities compete very well with those of other countries, particularly in the areas of life sciences and health, nanotechnology and information technology.

For this reason, the economic benefit to Switzerland exceeded the economic cost of Switzerland's participation in the 6th EU Framework Programme (FP6).

Research grants drawn from the EU Framework Programme budget are awarded on a competitive basis to applicants whose projects are considered top-notch.

For the entire duration of FP6, 1,914 Swiss researchers took part in 1,355 different research projects, which corresponded to a 2.6% share of total participation. Both Austria and Switzerland ranked 11th among the countries involved in FP6.

By far the most active countries were Germany (13.9%), the United Kingdom (11.9%) and France (10.7%).

While Switzerland ranked 11th in terms of the number of participants, it ranked 9th in terms of research grants drawn from the FP6 budget.

The countries that obtained the lion's share of research grant funding were Germany (17.9%), the United Kingdom (14.4%) and France (12.6%). Switzerland's share stood at 3.1% of the total FP6 budget of CHF793mn.

This level places Switzerland far ahead of competing countries such as Austria, Denmark, Finland and Norway.

EU research grants mainly went to Swiss universities (ETH Domain: CHF270m, cantonal universities: CHF219m, universities of applied sciences: CHF18m).

A significant part of the remaining grants was awarded to private businesses (SMEs: CHF111mn, large-sized industries: CHF92mn).

Swiss research activities in FP6 related to "information technology" (CHF225mn), "life sciences and health" (CHF161mn) and "nanotechnology, materials and new production processes" (CHF92mn).

Swiss researchers coordinated 185 FP6 projects.

In nearly 4/5 of the cases, project managers came from a Swiss university (ETH: 76 projects, cantonal universities: 68 projects). Project managers from Swiss businesses ran 15 projects.

FP6 led to roughly 32,000 incidences of research cooperation between Swiss and EU teams. Switzerland's key partner countries were Germany, the United Kingdom and France, which were the most active participants in FP6.

Switzerland contributed CHF780mn (2.68%) to the total FP6 budget of EUR19.3bn.

From the total budget for research funding, Swiss researchers were awarded 3.06%.

Recommended