Particular interest in the associated countries was noticed. The proposals are under evaluation in May.

REGPOT

REGPOT-2008-1 which focused on the upgrade of research potential envisaged a project budget between 500,000 and 1,000,000 euro and an overall call budget of 29 million euro.
It is therefore most heavily oversubscribed. A low success rate has to be expected.

Out of the 475 proposals submitted, 190 (!) are coordinated by Turkish institutions, 74 by Greek and then 38 by institutions from Serbia. 30 proposals were submitted from Poland and on the fifth rank is Croatia with 24 proposals.
FYR of Macedonia was also very active with 12 proposals, from Montenegro 4 proposals were recorded.
In total coordinators were from 18 member states (among those the most active apart from Greece and Poland are Bulgaria, Romania and Estonia with more than 10 proposals from those countries) and 6 associated countries (apart from the mentioned WBC, there was also one proposal submitted by and Israeli institution).

REGPOT-2008-2 has seen 30 project proposals submitted requesting an average contribution of approx. 100.000 euro.
Coordinators from 7 member states and 4 associated countries submitted proposals. Again, Turkey is the source of most proposals (8) but with lesser gap: 7 proposals were submitted from Romania, 5 from Bulgaria and 3 from Spain. In the other countries involved, only one proposer was submitting an application: they come from Germany, FYR of Macedonia, Greece, Croatia, Montenegro, Poland and Slovakia.

Regions of Knowledge

REGIONS-2008-1 involved overall 671 partners in the 67 project proposals. Coordinators are located in 19 member states and 6 associated countries (partners are involving an additional 7 member states and another associated country).
The most active countries in the Regions call were Greece and Italy (8 proposals each), Germany, Spain and Finland (5 each).
Montenegro, FYR of Macedonia and Serbia submitted one proposal each.
For this call 9.3 million euro are available, the proposals request in average 893,000 euro.

REGIONS-2008-2, with a call budget of only 800,000 euro received 41 proposals involving 256 partners. The regional coverage for this call is focused on 11 member states and one associated country (involving 4 more member states as partners). No Western Balkan country was involved in this call (coordinators are coming from Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Spain, Finland, France, Hungary, italy, Malta, Poland, Romania and Turkey).

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The interest raised in associated countries, and especially in Turkey, is really a clear feature of these calls. Serbia has again been considerably active (especially in REGPOT-1). Croatia has also exploited the opportunity, but maybe not according to its absorption capacity.
FYR of Macedonia has insitutions in 3 of the calls and although Montenegro had only signed its Memorandum of Understanding to associate to FP7 recently, it had a considerable participation in these calls.
Albania could not yet use this first opportunity as associated country, as no proposal was submitted from this county. Bosnia and Herzegovina was not eligible for participation, as the it is not yet associated to the Framework Programme.