Report finds Cyprus has best new Member State ICT research programme
A report on the research programmes for information and communications technologies (ICT) in the new EU Member States and the candidate countries has given Cyprus' programme the highest marks. The report was produced by the ALIPRO project, funded under the information society technologies (IST) section of the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). ALIPRO united 14 organisations - one from each of the new Member States and the candidate countries, and one from Germany. Together the partners carried out a comparative analysis of 32 research programmes from the participating countries. The Cypriot programme scored the highest average value (3.75 out of 4) in the benchmarking exercise, followed by programmes from Hungary, Estonia, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Poland. All of these programmes are in the same league as three reference programmes (the FP6 IST programme, EUREKA's CELTIC programme and three German programmes), according to the report. The partners found that the weakest areas in all programmes assessed were openness, financial capacity and management quality. The report notes that these findings illustrate how difficult it may be to align national programmes within the context of creating a European Research Area (ERA). The report also draws attention to the heterogeneity and fragmentation of the programmes assessed, and to the different research priorities within each country. Of the programmes studied, only two were related to mobile technologies, and only four were classified as IST-oriented. General national research programmes were also found to not place priority on IST. Budgets also vary significantly, even when nominal values are converted into Purchasing Power Standard (PPS). For example, the Bulgarian IST programme has an annual budget of 134,000 euro in PPS terms, while the comparable programme in the German region of Bavaria has a budget of 4.5 million euro. Finally, the report notes a common characteristic of research in all countries assessed: research policies and strategies, including research programmes, have been strongly influenced by the European integration process. 'In general, this influence has been evident by the redesign of national public research funding systems following the example of the EC Framework Programmes and the objectives of ERA and the Lisbon Strategy,' states the report. While this did make the task of the ALIPRO partners more difficult, it is of course good news for the proponents of a European Research Area.