Structural Involvement and Financial Success in the European Framework Programme: The Case of Austria

Abstract

The European Framework Programmes (EU-FPs) are a key policy instrument of the European Union for improving the competitiveness of European science and industry. In place since the 1980s, they have added a substantial amount of money to research, technology, and innovation (RTI) funding all over Europe. As such they have offered incentives for trans-national RTI cooperation in terms of ambitious and typically strategic projects, both for organizations as well as regions and Member States. The focus of this study is on the Austrian participation on the level of thematic areas under the COOPERATION programme in FP7. Our objective is to relate Austria’s financial success in these areas to various input-oriented measures, and to contribute to the discussion of complementarity of national and EU policy measures in the field of RTI. We develop a new indicator, namely the structural involvement of a member state into thematic networks in the EU-FP, and employ methods from social network analysis to examine the importance of close linkages to European collaboration networks as compared to classical indicators, like the number of project participations, project coordinations, success rates or the availability of funds. By this, the study departs from existing work by pointing to further valuable indicators for the evaluation of the involvement of countries in EU-FP networks. From the findings, we conclude that structural involvement in EU-FP networks is a necessary condition for leveraging complementary funds on the EU-level. Thus, the study produces some promising results for policy development on the national level, especially regarding involvement in Joint Technology Initiatives and new approaches like the Joint Programming Initiative.