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Portugal's participation in the Horizon 2020 program with unprecedented results

With almost two years of Horizon 2020 - Community Framework Programme for Research & Innovation, scientists, research units and companies in Portugal have raised 204 million euros of funding, which corresponds to 1.8% of the total funding to Call. These results represent a significant improvement compared to the 1.15% of funds raised in the previous framework program, FP7, and suggest that the national R&D community is on track to achieve the 1.5% target set for the overall period 2014-2020.

In 2014 Portugal managed to raise a total of about 146 million euros of the approximately 8.5 billion euros allocated by Horizon 2020 (success rate of 1.75%). Having Portugal contributed about 120 million euros in 2014, the country ceased to be a net contributor to this type of funding and managed, for the first time in the history of European competitive funding for science, to obtain more funding than the country invested in the program.

This positive trend continued in 2015: with about one-third of Calls cleared, the results so far indicate that the country has already captured 2 percent of the total available budget - again well above Horizon 2020's seven-year target of 1.5 percent.

FP7 & H2020

Among the 413 proposals with Portuguese participation approved, there are so far 97 coordinated by Portuguese entities, including 11 from the Twinning program. Twinning allows the establishment of partnerships between entities in countries considered to have low scientific performance and leading European institutions, encouraging the strengthening of scientific capacity and internationalization of institutions in eligible countries.

The 11 Portuguese Twinning proposals selected for funding (among 65 funded at European level), represent about 11.2 million euros, of which 6.17 are destined for national institutions, and the rest to international partners that will collaborate with them. The national institutions are the Institute of Molecular Medicine of the University of Lisbon (3 contracts), the 3B's Institute of the University of Minho (2 contracts), INESC-Porto, the Higher Institute of Agronomy of the University of Lisbon, UNINOVA, the University of Coimbra, the University of Lisbon and CIIMAR - Interdisciplinary Center for Marine and Environmental Research.

The global results of the Portuguese participation in H2020 are available here here (updated periodically).