Participations to European Framework Programs of higher education institutions and their association with organizational characteristics

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze patterns of participation of higher education institutions (HEIs) to European Framework Programs (EU-FP) and their association with HEI characteristics, country and geographical effects. We have analyzed a sample of 2235 HEIs in 30 countries in Europe, derived from the European Tertiary Education Register (ETER), which has been matched with data on participations in EU-FPs in 2011 using the EUPRO database. Our findings identified (1) a high concentration of EU-FP participation in a small group of HEIs with high reputation; (2) the participation of non-doctorate awarding HEIs in EU-FPs is very limited despite the fact that they account for a significant share of tertiary student enrolments; (3) the number of participations tends to increase proportionally to organizational size, and is strongly influenced by international reputation; (5) there is limited evidence of significant country effects in EU-FP participations, as well as of the impact of distance from Brussels. We interpret these results as an outcome of the close association between HEI reputation and the network structure of EU-FP participants.

Closed clubs: Network centrality and participation in Horizon 2020

“…The few studies dealing with this level of analysis have indicated skewed distribution of participation, without concluding as to whether allocation of funding is non-meritocratic (5,16,43,44). Large and highly reputed HEIs are generally most successful in applying for funding in EU FP projects (45).…”

“…Our empirical analysis is based on the European Tertiary Education Register (ETER) database 1 (47). The data contain detailed organizational-level statistics on research and education, and have been used previously for similar types of analyses (5). We extracted a as successful applications for H2020.…”

“…Competition for funding in the European Union's current Framework Programme for research and innovation (EU FP), Horizon 2020 (H2020), is becoming fiercer because of reduced national research budgets across Europe (3,4). Recent studies report continued success for a few endowed higher education institutions (HEI) in applying for collaborative projects, resulting in persistent oligarchic networks that would appear to constitute 'clubs' closed to those less fortunate (see 2,5).…”

“…Research on EU FPs has focused on convergence between national and EU policies (see 10,[11][12][13], impact from participation (see 14,15) and organizational characteristics associated with participation (see 5,16). Most attention, however, has been devoted to the collaborative nature of EU FP projects (see 2,17,[18][19][20][21][22][23].…”

Bringing home the bacon: the relationship between firm characteristics and participation in EU Horizon 2020 projects

“…This gap, in turn, has prompted research authorities in many European countries to a search for ways of increasing their countries' participation in the FPs and inspired many European researchers to explore why some countries are more successful than others at securing European research and innovation grants. The result of this effort is that there is now an extensive literature discussing factors that primarily enable universities to obtain funding from the FPs (Enger and Castellacci 2016;Lepori et al 2015;Neufeld, Huber, and Wegner 2013), less so on private firms.…”