The Czech Republic in FP7: Low participation with high collaborative excellence

The Framework Programmes for research and technological development (FPs) are very important instruments fostering the growth of the European Union’s potential needed to achieve breakthrough solutions to urgent and difficult problems that are unlikely to be properly tackled at the level of individual national research and development systems. The FPs mainly support projects with considerable “European added value” that stem from transnational collaboration in research, development, and innovation (R&D&I). However, attempts to measure the collaboration [1, 8] are still rather rare and usually based on analysing project results. This article deals with a simple index [2, 3], which might be interpreted as representing the value of “collaborative potential” of EU member countries. Namely, for each given country the index quantifies the ability of its teams to collaborate in transnational consortia with teams from the most prestigious European scientific institutions. Since the “standard” indicators used in FP assessment characterize the participation of member countries in FP7 rather than quantitatively analyse their collaboration [4, 1], the proposed index should complement the usual studies focused on analysing per country participation in FP7. This article confirms the low participation of Czech (CZ) teams in FP7, which was discussed in many previous studies. However, we want to argue that the participating CZ teams collaborate with teams from premier European institutions more intensively than teams from many other member countries.