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Where does European funding to research go?

Europe spends a lot of money in research and innovation. The European Commission estimates that its 7th Framework Programme 2007-2013 (FP7 henceforth) invested 55.8 billion EUR. This is an impressive achievement, but many people who travel through the Europrojects world have the feeling that it is quite self-referential, with relatively few large universities, research centres and seasoned consultants playing a disproportionate role in attracting funding. These people maintain it is very hard to win a grant without at least one of the usual suspects as an ally. Is it true?

We address this question using the fact that beneficiaries of research funding are generally not individual organisations, but consortia. This allows us to represent FP7 as a graph: an organisation is connected to a (funded) project if it is a member of the consortium charged with implementing the project itself. From this representation we can derive a second one, where two organisations are connected if they participate to the same (funded) project. Analysing the graph's characteristics we can detect stable alliances; determine if the FP7 environment is fully connected (everyone is collaborating with everyone else) or, viceversa, if there are "islands" of mutually exclusive alliances; if there are strongly central organisations ("the usual suspects"), and who they are; and if such centrality is rewarded with funding grants or, viceversa, if playing the role of connector in the network does not correlate with receiving funding.

This project was initiated as part of the hackathon at SOD15, the third gathering of the Spaghetti Open Data community.