Much attention has been devoted in recent years to the importance of strengthening intra-European research collaboration and coordination for sustaining European competitiveness in the global economy. Coordination among research funders is particularly interesting in this respect, as research councils and other research funding organizations play an important role in shaping research priorities, implementing R&D programmes, and allocating funds for research activities.

Transnational research collaboration and coordination enable the exploitation of complementary research strengths across countries, joint policy responses to common challenges such as for example climate change, more efficient coordination of research activities, and strengthened competitiveness in the global science and technology arena.

Increased coordination and collaboration between European research funders therefore plays an important role in supporting the development of the European Research Area (ERA) and efforts to reach the Barcelona objectives of raising investment in research to three percent by 2010.

It is, however, widely recognized that European research coordination and collaboration leaves something to be desired, an issue that has, among others, been explored in studies commissioned by the European Commission in 2005 and 2008.

The purpose of this note from the Danish Business Research Academy (DEA) is to build on these previous studies by presenting results from a recent survey among European research funding bodies on the current degree of international orientation and coordination in the European research funding system.

The survey was conducted as part of a larger study of the internationalization of Danish private sector research, published in its entirety in the DEA report “Knowledge across borders.” As such, the survey is smaller in scope than the aforementioned previous reports on international research collaboration and coordination. However, the survey updates and lends support to key findings in these reports, notably regarding the barriers to increased intra-European research collaboration and coordination that persist.

The main conclusion emerging from this survey is that European research funders have a substantial degree of international orientation and engage in a broad range of activities towards greater transnational research collaboration and coordination. As such, considerable progress towards greater awareness and use of mechanisms for increased transnational research coordination has been made among European research funders. However, there is still a significant proportion of research funders whose funds have a non-existent or limited degree of openness towards, for example transnational research projects, contributions to common pots and non-resident research participants. The results of the survey therefore also indicate that there is still much scope for improvement, if the Barcelona objectives are to be realized.