NL awarded billions in EU research grants

When we talk about winning money for EU researches, Dutch researchers and entrepreneurs walk hand in hand. They have managed to receive almost 3,4 billion euro between 2007 and 2013. This is almost one and a half times the amount that The Netherlands pays for via the EU budget, wrote Education Secretary Sander Dekker and Economics Affairs Minister Henk Kamp in a letter to Parliament on Friday. The Netherlands leads all other European Union member states when it comes to winning funding, after adjusting for each country's GDP. Almost 5,200 Dutch researchers were granted subsidies by the Seventh Framework program for research and Technological Development (KP7) of the European Union. In total 26,500 European research programs were granted funds by the EU. Of the €3.4 billion, €700 million came from the European Research Council. The main criterium required to be eligible for such grants is peer-reviewed excellence and high risk, high reward frontier research. The Dutch research proposals are of very high quality according to the ministers. Almost a quarter of all Dutch proposals for the research program KP7 gets financed, while the European average is only 17 percent. "The Netherlands has a great knowledge base of top notch researchers and companies who are world leaders in their sector. By utilizing the tools for knowledge and innovation offered by the European Union, Dutch entrepreneurs and repositories of knowledge receive the opportunity to put their knowledge into innovating more products and services,” it was said by Minister Kamp.