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For a small country with insufficient pool of human resources, pan-European programmes such as Framework Programme (FP) represent an excellent possibility to embark on collaborative R&D projects and exploit their part of research capacities. For researchers the collaborative projects represent a possibility to do the best research together with excelling research partners, for SMEs the projects provide unique opportunity to share risks of their R&D with EU funding, but also create strong partnerships with possible end users and address future markets.

On the other hand, limited funds (tentatively, the budget of FP6 is less than 5% of all EU Member States R&D spending) and high interest amongst FP constituency underline very competitive nature of participation in the programme. With average success rates well below one fourth, it is the programme for the very best and experienced. Frequently, it applies also for countries – countries with higher innovation capacity, strong science and technology coordination policies and experienced support structures have also leading edge in Framework Programme, as their competitive position is better suited to the very nature of the programme. Thus, the chances of new member states to be particularly successful in FP is more a wishful thinking than current reality, as framework for participation in those countries is different.

Having said this, it would be interesting to analyse Estonia’s position in the Framework Programme. Estonia is one of the new member states, who started participating in FP more actively around six years ago, when FP5 commenced. Thus, it has been a valuable learning process for the country with less than 1,5 million of population and This short observation is based on the official data from the end of 2004.

By the end of 2004, different Estonian organisations had participated in the submission of 711 project applications. 140 of these projects were successful, approaching 20% of success rate. 50 Estonian partners participate in 47 projects and have received EUR 4.2 million for the support of their activities.

How to evaluate the success of Estonia? The framework programme has certainly activated an unprecedented number of Estonian organisations which have capacity for
research and innovation. 637 organisations have participated in calls for proposals.
Traditionally, educational and research institutions have been more active (57.1%), also different foundations, non-profit organisations and consultation firms are very active (29.8%). The proportion of industrial enterprises is 13%, but at the same time 16.4% of
all organisations have defined themselves as SME.

Estonians have participated mostly in proposals for integrated projects (24.5%), STREP (22.5%) and SSA (18.2%), by rule as a partner organisation. The programmes with most active participation were IST (122), Marie Curie (87), and Citizens and Governance in a Knowledge-based Society (social sciences and humanities) (84). The highest numbers of successful projects have been in IST (26), Biotechnology (13), and Marie Curie (13).

FP6 with changed modalities and larger projects has decreased the activity of Estonian organisation in initiating the projects as coordinator, partner’s role is more preferential. At the same time, participation in larger projects facilitates contacts with larger number of foreign partners, which hopefully will bear results in the closest future.