Algeria
Egypt
Israel
Jordan
Lebanon
Libya
Morocco
Palestine *
Syria *
TunisiaIsrael celebrates 20th anniversary of association to EU Research and Innovation Programme
January 12, 2017
Share on 
Hundreds of Israeli researchers and officials have gathered to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Israel’s association to the European Union’s Research and Innovation Programme. The event was organised this week by the EU Delegation to Israel and ISERD – The Israeli Directorate for EU Framework Programmes.
A conference was held and included three panels on “Excellence in Science”, “Knowledge Transfer” and “Small and Medium Sized Enterprises”. The event ended with the presentation of awards to the 15 coordinators of this year’s Horizon 2020 projects and the seven Rectors of Israel’s universities.
In 1996, Israel was the first non-European country to be associated to the EU’s “Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development”. These seven-year programmes have become the largest publicly funded R&D programmes in the world. The current programme “Horizon 2020”, which Israel joined in 2014, has a budget of close to €80 billion for the period 2014-2020.
The Framework Programmes (FP) combine numerous fields of research and diverse funding tools and are open to participants from academia, industry and the public sector. Beyond the possibility of winning prestigious research and development grants, they have enabled Israel to integrate with the European academic research community, to cooperate with key players in Europe, to influence European regulations, to have access to research infrastructure and to be exposed to massive European research projects.
Over the past 20 years of partnership, overall Israeli investment amounted to €1.375 billion, while the return to Israeli entities in the form of grants reached €1.7 billion. Over 3,000 projects submitted by Israeli entities were approved involving 4,435 participants. Of these, 2,450 were academic researchers, 1,270 were industrial researchers, and 715 researchers from other sectors. EU figures show that in the previous programme, FP7, Israeli researchers participated in 1,620 projects for which €875.08 million was received. In Horizon 2020, Israeli researchers are already participating in over 430 projects for which they will receive close to €350 million.
Read more
EU Neighbours – Israel
EU Delegation to Israel – website
Countries covered:
-
Israel
