New Report "Industry Funding for Academic Research in Informatics in Europe"

The report presents the results of a pilot study exploring the landscape of industry-funded Informatics research in academic institutions in Europe. Until now, no systematic study of the funding relation between industry and academia in Informatics has been reported in Europe and therefore no knowledge existed about which research areas receive more or less funding from industry. To fill this gap and understand better the industry funding landscape in Europe Informatics Europe conducted a pilot study including nine institutions, members of Informatics Europe, from four European countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and UK.

The results of this small scale study have shown that the institutions included received together close do 50 million EUR in funding from industry along an average of three years per project. Visualization, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Ubiquitous Computing, Data Management Systems, Blockchain, Applied Computing for Life and Medical Sciences, Systems Security, Machine Learning and Architectures were the top ten funded fields receiving more than 70% of the total funding. Each of these research areas received above 1 Million EUR from industry during the whole period of funding reported. The report present a number of further interesting analysis and comparisons and can be downloaded here.

We believe that the publication of the pilot study is a very important milestone and will certainly generate interest not only in the academic community but also in industry and funding organizations across Europe. Informatics Europe plans to scale up the pilot study to include a higher number of countries and institutions with the goal of producing a fully pan-European picture of the industry funding for academic research in Europe.

For any further questions and comments about the report, please contact: Svetlana Tikhonenko