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The European Commission, which invests in science through the European Union’s ‘Horizon’ funding programmes, spent more than US$16 billion on grants that led to papers co-authored by private-sector researchers in the period 2020 to 2024.
It spent roughly twice as much as Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), the second-ranked funder for such grants, according to the available data. NEDO, which is Japan’s national research and development agency, spent $8.02 billion over that period.
The data come from the Digital Science Dimensions database, extracted by the Nature Research Intelligence team. It was used as part of an analysis of the biggest funders of research papers published in 2020–24 with at least one corporate co-author.
Among the top ten funders, most spent between $2 billion and $4 billion.
According to the data, the European Commission awarded at least twice as many individual grants (2,490) as the other top funders. NEDO, by comparison, only awarded 22 individual grants during the five-year analysis period.
The reason NEDO’s total awarded amount is so high despite the number of grants being low is because a single massive grant accounts for most of the funding over the period. NEDO awarded roughly $7.5 billion in 2020 to the Post-5G Information and Communication Systems Infrastructure Reinforcement R&D Project, a major government initiative that aims to strengthen Japan’s technological and industrial base for next-generation communication systems. More than 250 publications have resulted from the grant so far, according to Dimensions.
On the receiving end
One challenge when interpreting grants data is the delay between when the grants are awarded and when the resulting publications are produced.
Data on funding are also not comprehensive, as many funders do not publish or allow access to their grants data. Funding information from China-based institutions, for example, is incomplete. So, caution must be taken when interpreting any trends.
The data do, however, provide insight into which institutions are strongly supporting industry research. They also reveal which corporate institutions are attracting large amounts of research funding.
The corporate institution that received the most funding for research papers published in 2020–24 with at least one corporate-affiliated author is Thales, a French multinational technology company headquartered in Paris that specializes in aerospace, defence and cybersecurity. The company received a share of 65 grants from 2020 to 2024 that were worth $961.76 million in total (the data do not break down how much individual institutions received from grants that went to multiple organizations).
Finland’s CSC – IT Center for Science, a state-owned digital services company that works in the research, education and innovation sectors, was associated with the second highest grant amount, at $910.48 million across 24 grants.
The dominance of European companies in this top ten suggests that these companies have benefitted from the large amount of funding distributed by the European Commission in 2020–24.
