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How has Hungary fared in the European Commission’s Sixth Framework Programme? While data is only available for four of the six calls, it is still possible to draw some preliminary conclusions. This data was provided aby the National Research and Technology Agency, as well as the National Office for Research and Technology.

The good news is Hungary’s overall performance in FP6 has increased over the previous FP5 program. Unfortunately, the participation of small businesses has dropped significantly. It also seems clear that new Instruments introduced in FP6 have had the effect of excluding the participation of Hungary, and other New Member States (NMS).

The European Community’s Sixth Framework (FP6) is an EUR 17.5 billion program intended to foster European research and development toward the goal of creating the European Research Area. FP6 is seen as essential in achieving the March 2000 Lisbon goal of turning Europe into the world’s most competitive knowledge-based economy by 2010.

With the entry of Hungary and the New Member States into the European Union, the participation of these countries has increased from 2.86% of the FP5 budget to 3.48% of FP6. As of this writing, the total budget apportioned to Hungarian FP6 projects and participants is EUR 27.6 million.

According to available figures, Hungarians submitted 899 applications in 649 projects, for a total potential budget of EUR 179 million. Of that, 265 applications (constituting 199 projects) went to the approval stage, representing EUR 47 million. 173 applications (135 projects) have received funding to a total of EUR 27.6 million.

As of April 2005, a total of 179 FP6 contracts included a Hungarian partner. By far the greatest proportion were in the thematic area of Information Society Technologies (IST), which numbered 34 contracts, or 19.0% of the total. This was followed by Research for Policy Support (17 or 9.5%), Life Sciences Genomics and Biotechnology for Health (15 or 8.4%) and Specific Research Activities for SMEs (15 or 8.4%).

In monetary terms, however, IST projects far outweighed the others thematic areas in value, accounting for some EUR 5.5 million, or just over a quarter of Hungary’s share of FP6. The second runner up was Life Sciences, with EUR 3.6 million in funding.

The figures show that Hungary has been successful at winning with IST projects. Hungary ranked 18 out of 31 countries based on its success rate for winning FP6 IST tenders, leading every other NMS country except for Poland. While Hungary scored slightly below the EU average for FP5, the country’s success rate jumped to 20.4% for the Second Call of FP6, compared to the average performance of 13.7%.

Unfortunately, the share of small businesses (SMEs) has fallen sharply. In FP5, SMEs took part in 35% of projects, which dropped to just 24% in FP6. In large part, the slack has been taken up higher education, which has increased its share from 19% of FP5 to 39% of FP6.

This decrease may be due in part to the introduction of two new instruments: Integrated Projects (IP) and Networks of Excellence (NoE). The figures show that Hungary has had a low success rate with these two instruments (around 8% in both cases) as compared to Specific Targeted Research Projects (23%) and Coordinated Actions (28%). A report published in January 2005 warns that these instruments are excluding SMEs and NMS from FP6 programs.