{"id":19303,"date":"2015-03-01T17:01:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-01T17:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/technopolis-group.com\/mind-the-gap-funding-strategic-research-in-sweden\/"},"modified":"2020-04-08T15:20:37","modified_gmt":"2020-04-08T15:20:37","slug":"mind-the-gap-funding-strategic-research-in-sweden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/technopolis-group.com\/sv\/mind-the-gap-funding-strategic-research-in-sweden\/","title":{"rendered":"Mind the gap: Funding \u2018strategic\u2019 research in Sweden"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-pullquote\"><blockquote><p>Many countries struggle to fund \u2018strategic\u2019 research \u2013 that is, research intended to underpin applications but that is itself rather fundamental in nature. Whether described as \u2018strategic\u2019, \u2018oriented basic\u2019 or \u2018enabling\u2019, this kind of research can be hard to fund in traditional research funding structures with a basic research council on the one hand and an innovation agency on the other. The risk is that it is seen as too \u2018applied\u2019 for a research council and too \u2018basic\u2019 for an innovation agency to handle.   <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>In Sweden,\nthe Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research\n(SSF) is a major funder of\nstrategic research. It is the biggest of the \u2018wage-earner fund\u2019 foundations in Sweden.\nThe wage-earner funds were set up\nby the social democrats in the early 1980s to invest in major Swedish companies\non behalf of Swedish workers. A\nconservative government abolished them in 1992 and used their capital to set up\nseveral research and venture\ncapital foundations in 1994. The biggest of the research foundations are SSF, Mistra\n(which funds environmental\nresearch) and the Knowledge Foundation, which funds knowledge-intensive industry and\nthe development of the regional\nuniversities and colleges. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Despite deciding in 1942 that the national research capacity was too small to fragment and therefore that the Swedish universities should handle not only basic research but also research for applications and to meet government and social needs, Swedish policymakers have struggled to sustain a strategic research funder in the state sector. The technology research council (TFR) set up in 1942 largely funded engineering and in 1968 it was absorbed into the new innovation agency (STU, which later became Nutek and is now VINNOVA). After a while, government protested that STU neglected engineering research and it created a new technology research council (TFR) in 1990 to fund strategic research. TFR stayed independent until 2000, when it was integrated into the current Swedish Research Council (VR), a traditional \u2018basic\u2019 research funder that has no specific programmes for engineering or technology. Today, therefore, the state has no dedicated \u2018strategic\u2019 research funder. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"539\" src=\"https:\/\/technopolis-group.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/fhe-1024x539.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-10617\" srcset=\"https:\/\/technopolis-group.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/fhe-1024x539.png 1024w, https:\/\/technopolis-group.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/fhe-300x158.png 300w, https:\/\/technopolis-group.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/fhe-768x404.png 768w, https:\/\/technopolis-group.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/fhe-1536x809.png 1536w, https:\/\/technopolis-group.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/fhe-2048x1079.png 2048w, https:\/\/technopolis-group.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/fhe.png 1452w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><figcaption><em>Shares of competitive research, development, innovation and demonstration funding available in Sweden, 1995-2013  <br> <\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>In fact, STU\ngreatly increased its investment in strategic\nresearch during the 1970s and\n1980s, especially in ICT, biotech and materials \u2013 the \u2018enabling technologies\u2019 that\nseized the imagination of most\nwestern countries in that period. In 1997 the returning social democrat government slashed\nstate research budgets, aiming to force the foundations to fill the gap. Although\nthe wage-earner fund\nfoundations are legally independent and formally outside the state\u2019s control, SSF\nin practice took over a lot of STU\u2019s strategic research funding and, indeed, some of its\npersonnel. (Mistra took on many\nof the research questions formerly addressed by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, which lost its\nresearch budget.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Moving a lot\nof strategic research to SSF triggered it to\nbecome an important change agent.\nIt funded larger programmes\nand centres for strategic research, as did the innovation agency, building\nconcentrations of research strength and academic-industry cooperation in areas of\nindustrial significance to\nSweden. Like the other wageearner fund foundations, the fact that it was not\nlocked in by\nprevious commitments meant that SSF became a leading initiator of graduate\nschools \u2013 responding to a clear need to increase the number of PhD graduates working\nin Swedish industry. SSF also\nprovided large grants and leadership training to promising younger researchers, prefiguring\nERC\u2019s starter grants within strategic technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The reform of the Swedish funding system in 2000 that created VINNOVA and VR created a state funding structure that does not emphasise strategic research, precisely because SSF provided such funding. As the chart shows, this reform took place at the point where SSF\u2019s expenditure was at its highest \u2013 in fact, about a billion Swedish kronor. Since then SSF\u2019s fund has slowly been run down. The foundation now spends about 5-600 million kronor annually, a figure that cannot be sustained for many more years. It seems that something has to change in the funding system soon, before a lack of strategic research funding once again becomes a problem. and is currently undergoing radical redesign. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many countries struggle to fund \u2018strategic\u2019 research \u2013 that is, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,237],"tags":[],"solution":[],"sector":[132],"class_list":["post-19303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-okategoriserad","category-technopolitan-sv","sector-research-innovation-sv"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Mind the gap: Funding \u2018strategic\u2019 research in Sweden - Technopolis Group<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/technopolis-group.com\/sv\/mind-the-gap-funding-strategic-research-in-sweden\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"sv_SE\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mind the gap: Funding \u2018strategic\u2019 research in Sweden - 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