First results of second Growth call for proposals
In the second round of calls for proposals for the Commission's Fifth RTD Framework programme, the 'Competitive and Sustainable Growth programme' reached its objective of increasing the critical mass of its proposals, with the number of partners per consortia surpassing 10 for the first time. The result comes against a background of an overall success rate of one in three, a figure similar to the first call, which closed in June 1999. The size of partnerships has been steadily increasing ever since the first research programmes on industrial technologies and materials were launched over 10 years ago, and topped an average of 10.6 in this call, which closed on 31 March 2000. The average requested funding per proposal has therefore increased in comparison to the first call, reaching a figure of 2.7 million euro. The total Community funding requested from the 947 proposals received amounts to around 2.2 billion euro, equivalent to three times the indicative budget of 595 million euro allocated to this call. After technical and socio-economic evaluation carried out by 40 panels of independent experts, 288 proposals (including 259 shared cost collaborative and 24 thematic networks and concerted actions proposals) successfully passed the evaluation thresholds and were given a priority ranking for immediate negotiation. Negotiation of recommended proposals is now underway, and the first contracts will be sent out for signature in November so projects can start early next year. The 288 selected proposals encompass 3045 organisations, ninety-one per cent of which are from the 15 EU Member States. The remaining organisations come mainly from Norway, Switzerland, Poland and Israel. The organisations represented are 29 per cent large companies, 21 per cent research organisations, 21 per cent universities, 17 per cent SMEs, and 12 per cent others.