EEDA - East of England Development Agency

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The 7th Research Framework Programme

Running for 7 years (2007-2013) the FP7 research programme aims to build the European Research Area, and to address key R&D objectives through four programmes:-

The Co-operation Programme

This will take up the bulk of FP7 research funding, an estimated €32 billion.

• Objective: Creating European poles of excellence through trans-national collaboration between research centres, universities, and companies. Networks of Excellence are designed to contribute to this goal. In FP7 the collaborative research effort will be divided in 9 thematic areas, each with its own sub-programme.
  Objective: Launching European technology initiatives in promising industrial sectors. European Technology Platforms will bring together all stakeholders from a specific subject area to define a common long-term research agenda. The intention is to mobilise a critical mass of national and European, public and private resources. 
• Objective: Improving co-ordination between national research programmes, and the co-operation between European intergovernmental research organisations and the EU. To be promoted through the ERA-NET+ scheme and new Article 169 initiatives.

Activities under the Co-operation Programme will include:-

• Transnational collaborative research activities in the following thematic areas: 
• Health 
• Food, Agriculture and biotechnology 
• Information and communication technologies 
• Nanosciences, nanotechnologies materials and new production technologies 
• Energy 
• Environment (including climate change) 
• Transport (including aeronautics) 
• Socio-economic sciences and humanities 
• Security and space
• Joint Technology Initiatives - long term public private partnerships covering a few selected areas mostly determined by the Technology Platforms 
• Coordination of public research programmes 
• International cooperation outside the European Union

The Ideas Programme

• Objective: stimulating basic (or 'frontier') research through open competition between individual research teams at European level, supervised by a new European Research Council and based purely on scientific excellence.

The People Programme

• Objective: making Europe more attractive to the best researchers. Through reinforcing "Marie Curie actions" for the support of researchers, increasing mobility between university and industry, and strengthening links with national systems. 
• Initial training of researchers through the Marie Curie Networks 
• Lifelong training and career development to help researchers acquire new skills or enhance multidisciplinarity 
• Industry-academia partnerships to increase knowledge sharing 
• Attracting research talent from outside the EU 
• Actions to help remove obstacles to the creation of a truly European labour market for researchers

The Capacities Programme

• Objective: developing research infrastructures, research potential, and addressing the needs of SMEs. Seven sub-programmes will be created.
• Research Infrastructures
• Actions to support existing research infrastructures such as facilitating transnational access 
• Actions to support new research infrastructures such as their design and construction 
• Research for the benefit of Small and Medium sized Enterprises
• Actions to support small groups of SMEs solve common problems
• Regions of Knowledge 
• Activities bringing together regional actors involved in research in order to help strengthen their capacity for investing in R&D and carrying out research activities
• Research Potential 
• Activities to assist those in Europe's convergence and outermost regions to strengthen the capacity of their researchers to participate in EU research activities
• Coherent development of research policies 
• Science and Society 
• Activities helping to bring science closer to the society in which it is carried out, e.g. gender research, improved communications
• International cooperation 
• Activities helping the EU play a lead role at the world level and become competitive, e.g. strategic partnership.

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