This report analyses the role of foundations, funding and/or carrying out research and innovation programs in Bulgaria supporting the development of science and scientific institutions. In particular, we examine the types of foundations; origin of their funds and main sources of funding; their investments in research and innovation; supported key research areas; their role in the sphere of research and innovation. Empirical data in the report were collected through a large-scale survey of EU foundations and NGOs, funding and/or engaged in research and innovation, where ISSK – BAS was the Bulgarian partner. The survey was funded by the European Commission and was carried out in the period 2013-2014 in all EU Member States plus Switzerland and Norway. Coordinator of the research was the Department of Social Sciences at the Free University (VU) in Amsterdam.

Aims to build a theory of human creativity on the premisses of autopoietic systems theory (AST) in contrast to the classical representationist paradigm. Correspondingly, creativity is seen as an activity recurrently reproduced by couplings of specific states of moderate emotional arousal with “transitional” environments, i.e. “soft” social structures in which the world is permitted to be both subjective and objective; the archetype of these creative couplings can be found in the earliest “perfect environment” formed by the symbiotic infant‐mother relationship. Hypothesizes that these early states of synergy serve as centres of emotional gravity that are actively sought after by the mature creative person in his/her efforts to overcome splits of verbal space corresponding to schisms of cultural value and belief systems.