European Commission published the Ninth Progress Report on SMEs participation in the 7th R&D Framework Programme. From the date of last survey (January 2012), SME share increased to 18.5nedeed_percents of all participations in the FP7 Cooperation programme. The percentage of used Cooperation programme budget going to SMEs has reached 16.3nedeed_percents, which represents about 3 Billion Euros total. SMEs were the most successful in such themes as NMP (Nanosciences, nanotechnologies, materials and production technologies) and SEC (Security research) (22.7nedeed_percents and 21.7nedeed_percents of the budget respectively).

Among 91000 FP7 participations, 16000 are SMEs. According to the Report, 74.5nedeed_percents of all the grant agreements involve at least one SME and 11.1nedeed_percents of all the projects have an SME as its coordinator. The average EU contribution going to SMEs participating in thematic research projects so far has been about €275000 per project.

This trend can be attributed to the increase and strengthening of measures in favour of SMEs under the two most recent work programmes. SME-specific measures taken range from the selection of topics of particular relevance to SMEs to calls ring-fencing specific SME budgets; another measure specifies the requirement for project participation that an SME must be the overall coordinator. These statistics suggest that SMEs have responded very positively to these specific measures, and have considerably stepped up their participation in projects as a result.

Russian Federation is a leader among “third countries” in the number of SMEs in FP7 consortia (38), leaving behind USA (31), India (19), Ukraine (15) and other countries outside European Union.

Report on the participation of SMEs in FP7, see the attachment: