On 6 July, EC published the first results of Horizon 2020 including the statistics of the first 100 calls that closed by 1 December 2014. 36 732 proposals were evaluated by 9 325 experts and about 3 200 projects have been awarded a total of €5.5 billion in EU funding. The overall success rate was about 14% (down from 20% for the whole FP7). France and Belgium had the highest success rates (about 17%). 38% of successful applicants were newcomers, which is a great improvement compared to 13% in the last year of FP7. 40% of newcomers were SMEs and this helped to meet the target of 20% for SME participation (up from 16% in FP7). The SME Instrument introduced in H2020 turned out to be very popular and 5% of the 20% EU financial contribution to SMEs ended up coming from SME Instrument. The popularity - 4 694 new applications - caused the success rate of SME Instrument to plummet down to 7.3%.
Out of the total funding granted (8.3 B€) Finland received 2.2%.
© European Union, 2015
