The resources will go to finance 61 collaborative research and development projects that aim to innovate the sector through the use of disruptive technologies 20 Jul 2022 F. Me.
The EU spige on Defense 4.0. The European Commission today announced its intention to provide a total EU funding of almost €1.2 billion to 61 collaborative defence research and development projects selected from the first calls for proposals under the European Defence Fund. "With proposals selected for funding, the Fund will support high-level defence capability projects, such as the next generation of combat aircraft, tanks and ships, as well as critical defence technologies such as military cloud, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, space, cyberspace or medical countermeasures. In addition, it will promote disruptive technologies, including quantum technologies and new materials, and will leverage promising SMEs and start-ups", underlines the EU Executive with a note. "The Fund is an extremely interesting programme, which has aroused strong interest from EU industry: a record number (far higher than the precursor programmes) of 142 proposals have been received, submitted by consortia composed of large leading companies, SMEs, mid-caps and research and technology organisations covering all published calls and themes", explains Brussels. And again: wide geographical coverage, with almost 700 legal entities from 26 EU Member States and Norway participating in the selected proposals; enhanced cooperation in the field of defence, given that on average the selected proposals involve 18 entities from 8 EU Member States and Norway; finally, strong participation of small and medium-sized enterprises, with SMEs representing more than 40% of all the entities participating in the selected proposals, and receiving almost 20% of the total European funding requested. "The Commission services will now start preparing grant agreements with the selected candidate consortia. Once the preparation has been completed and an allocation decision has been taken, the agreements will be signed by the end of the year," the statement concludes.