Dataset of projects co-funded by the ERDF during the multi-annual financial framework 2014-2020

Over the 2014-2020 financial period, 451 €bn of ESIF are invested in Cohesion policies, of which more than 40 €bn are dedicated directly to the thematic objective related to research and innovation. Among ESIF funds, ERDF is the main source of funding of innovation through the implementation of Smart specialisation strategies with a management shared between the Commission and the Regional or national authorities. The monitoring and the evaluation of ESIF are largely implemented at regional or national level. At European Commission level, the monitoring of Cohesion policy is carried out mainly at operational programme (OP) level, meaning that only very limited information is available at project and beneficiaries' level, also with limited accuracy in terms of geographical information (an OP can be national or in some cases multiregional). Reporting at project and beneficiary level is carried out through national or regional databases gathering information on beneficiaries (type of organisation, localisation etc.) and also details on funded projects (e.g. titles and abstracts and possibly other additional info depending the territory). Conversely to Horizon 2020 and due to the shared management, an integrated database of ESIF projects does not exist. While information on ESIF beneficiaries and projects is recorded, this is held by individual regional or national managing authorities. Bringing together this information on projects and beneficiaries in a single structured database would greatly benefit policy monitoring and evaluation, and the identification and creation of synergies with Horizon 2020 funding. This database would also feed ex-ante impact assessment analysis for the future multi-annual financial period (2021-2027), for the future cohesion policies and Horizon-Europe programme. To fill this gap, an initiative was launched under the Stairway to Excellence project, to design a structured and comprehensive database of projects funded by ERDF for the programming period 2014-2020 (as of June 2019), building on the systematic collection of all information available at national and regional levels. The whole content of the database is translated into English (including project titles and abstracts) using the European Commission Machine translation tool. The database offers also additional information such as keywords associated with each project in order to be able to bridge easily information contained in the ERDF projects database with, among others, Eye@RIS3 and the Horizon 2020 database. This report explains the origins of the information, the processing of collected information and the proxies used to obtain the most complete and comprehensive picture possible of ERDF funding support since 2014.