France performing well in FP6 but certain areas need more work, says report
A new report has been published assessing French participation in the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) up to mid-2005. It concludes that, in general terms, France performs well above the average and is situated in the EU top four, but further efforts are needed in terms of SMEs and their participation in the research programme. To assess France's performance, the study uses a range of indicators such as success rates for projects and for participants, proportion of projects coordinated and the share of EU funding allocated to participants of a certain Member State. Concerning the share of EU total funding, which should be the best indicator of national performance, two difficulties arise: data on funding at this stage are not reliable, as applications retained for funding are subject to further negotiation and the exact contributions are only known afterwards, and Networks of Excellence (NoE) are not included despite accounting for about one seventh of funding under the thematic priorities because they do not allocate funds to individual participants. The first part of the report is devoted to FP6 thematic areas, and was based on a recent study by the National Association of Technical Research (ANRT). It first summarises the global outcome of the first 40 calls for proposals under the FP6 thematic priorities. Up to the end of June 2005, from a total of 9,375 project proposals that had been submitted for funding, 1,797 were retained, that is to say a success rate of 19 per cent, or nearly 1 in 5. These proposals involved over 127,000 applicants for all countries, from which 28,117 participants have been retained, giving an average success rate for participants of 22 per cent. France's performance is well above the average: the success rate for French participants is 27.2 per cent, behind Belgium (28.2 per cent), the Netherlands (28 per cent) and Norway (27.6 per cent), but better placed than the UK (25 per cent) and Germany (24 per cent). In terms of having a French presence in EU funded initiatives, 65 per cent of retained projects had at least one French participant, a level only surpassed by Germany, present in 78 per cent of the projects, and the UK (69 per cent). A total of 15 per cent of the retained projects have a French coordinator, less than Germany with 20 per cent, but higher than the UK with 13 per cent. In overall terms, the indications from the 40 first calls for proposals (except NoE) are that France's take in financial terms was just over 1 billion euro, or about 13.2 per cent of the total contributions requested by retained projects, which places the country just behind top performers Germany (20 per cent) and the UK (13.6 per cent). The report also analyses the profile of the participants (academic research versus industrial and other). For all countries combined, 65 per cent of FP6 funding went to academic research partners (university and research centres), compared with 60 per cent in FP5. Industry partners (including SMEs) only get 27 per cent of the funding. SME participation in FP6 averages around 15 per cent overall, but accounts only for 10 per cent of the French participation, and is one area where the report says France could do better. France's strong performance in the 'aeronautics and space' priority is notable in terms of participation, success rates and share of EU funding. The country also performed well in the 'genomics and biotechnology for health', 'global change and ecosystems', 'surface transport' and 'information society technologies' priorities. French performance is average in the 'research and innovation' priority, and although its score for 'international co-operation activities' is very low, due to the nature of these actions, with a high number of partners from non-EU and third countries, similar results are obtained in most Member States. Finally, the report highlights France's 'very weak performance' in the specific domain of 'SME activities'.
Countries
France