Study of motives. A complementary analysis of participation in the European Defence Fund

The European Defence Fund (EDF) is an EU instrument for financing research and development in defence. Two rounds of EDF applications have been completed so far. Concentration of participation appear in different categories depending on which countries the participating organizations come from, which imply that there may be different motives for participation. The purpose of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of what the reasons for participating in EDF are. The study examines whether there is a connection between categories in EDF that have the highest grant allocations and other industry or materiel related factors in ten different countries. The results show that the categories with the highest allocation for the various countries generally have a strong connection to the activities carried out by the respective country's defence industry. There are also indications that the political orientations concerning technology areas have connections to the categories with high allocation.