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Italy, coordination

Dottorati innovativi con le imprese (PNRR M4C2 investment 3.3), XXXVIII cycle

Italy's Ministry of University and Research funded 1,708 company co-financed innovative doctoral scholarships in the 38th doctoral cycle (academic year 2022/2023), against the 5,000 that decree 352/2022 had allocated for that year, and cut the measure's target from 15,000 scholarships and 450 million euros to 6,000 scholarships and 360 million euros.

Italysince 2022delivered and closedbears on University-industry collaboration

1,708 doctoral scholarships, scholarships assigned ('borse assegnate'), xxxviii cycle, summed over tabella a of d.d. 1424/2024, 2022/2023 academic year. 5,000 doctoral scholarships, scholarships planned for 2022/2023 by d.m. 352 of 9 april 2022 (allocation, not delivery), 2022. Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca, Decreto Direttoriale n. 1424 del 26 settembre 2024 (rideterminazione, XXXVIII ciclo, ex D.D. 2153/2022), as archived by the Internet Archive, retrieved 2026-10-02.

The move, and what it needed

The ministry offered universities EU recovery money for doctoral scholarships on condition that a company co-financed each one and hosted the candidate, then cut the target and raised the public share when firms took up far fewer places than planned.

Preconditions

  • Universities accredited to run doctoral programmes with industrial partners
  • Firms with research functions willing to pay half a three-year scholarship
  • A temporary EU recovery budget large enough to fund thousands of scholarships at once

Where else it has been used: Industrial doctorate schemes funded from regular budgets (dnk-erhvervsforsker, fra-cifre) grew over decades; the Italian attempt to buy thousands in one year ran into the limit of firm demand.

Limits: The 1,708 is our sum of the 'Borse assegnate' column over 533 rows of Tabella A (PDF pages 3 to 21), which prints no total; it agrees with the decree's Article 2 total of 85,400,000 euros at 50,000 euros a scholarship. mur.gov.it refused script requests, so the cited copy is the Internet Archive's. The 15,000 target, the 450 million euro original allocation and its redetermination to 360 million euros are in the decree's preamble; the 6,000 figure is on the ministry's measure page (archived 13 June 2026, https://web.archive.org/web/20260613095831/https://www.mur.gov.it/it/pnrr/misure-e-componenti/m4c2/investimento-33-introduzione-di-dott-innovativi-che), not in this decree. The 5,000 allocated by decree 352/2022 covered the 2022/2023 year across courses accredited under both the XXXVII and XXXVIII cycle rules; we read all of them as XXXVIII cycle scholarships, which the decree does not state in so many words. A scholarship counts as assigned when funded, not when the doctorate is completed, and firm co-financing is a condition of the measure rather than a separately counted payment. The shortfall against the 5,000 and the cut in the target are a plan that was not met, not a loss from a delivered peak, so the record is not classed as a reversal: it shows that far fewer firms co-funded than the ministry budgeted for, and the decree's response was to raise the ministry's unit contribution from 30,000 to up to 60,000 euros per scholarship (capped at 20,000 euros extra for this cycle), which shifts cost from firms to the state. Later cycles (decree 117/2023) are not counted here, and the measure ended with the recovery plan in 2026.

This record describes what Italy delivered. It is linked to University-industry collaboration because no comparable dataset measures that capability. It does not affect the score or confidence.

More from Italy

6 other deliveries from this country.

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  • Cassa integrazione con causale Covid-19, 2020

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  • SPID, the public digital identity issued by accredited private providers

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  • Reconstruction after the 2016 and 2017 Central Italy earthquakes

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Every delivery from Italy

The same indicator elsewhere

37 deliveries linked to University-industry collaboration in other countries.

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  • SIBRATEC, the national technology networks

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  • Knowledge Transfer Partnerships

    UKRI reported more than 1,000 Knowledge Transfer Partnerships running at one time and more than 1,100 Associate projects in May 2026, joining businesses with universities or other research organisations through jointly supervised innovation work.

  • Cooperative Research Centres programme

    Australia's Department of Industry reported that its Cooperative Research Centres portfolio facilitated 304 businesses establishing research-focused collaborations in 2023–24, across 114 CRC and 190 CRC Projects partners, above the year's target of 248.

  • Portugal's CoLAB applied-research network

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  • TÜBİTAK 1505 university–industry support programme

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  • ANII Alianzas para la Innovación

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  • Doktorat wdrożeniowy (implementation doctorate) programme

    Poland's science ministry opened the implementation doctorate in the 2017/2018 academic year, funding doctoral candidates to do their research inside a firm or institution. In its first five editions 2,293 projects were approved, 479 people qualified for the sixth edition in 2022/2023, and 69.6 percent of the doctorates ran in the private sector.

  • SFI Research Centres programme

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  • Strategic Centres for Science, Technology and Innovation (SHOKs), terminated in 2015

    Finland ran six Strategic Centres for Science, Technology and Innovation from 2008, company-form consortia of firms, universities and research institutes funded about 60 percent by Tekes, with funding of EUR 88 million in 2014; the Sipilä government's austerity programme ended the earmarked funding at the end of 2015 and the programme was closed, with the last Tekes-funded projects wound down between 2016 and 2018.

  • Innosuisse innovation projects with implementation partners

    Innosuisse, the Swiss federal innovation agency, recorded CHF 113.95 million of contributions in 2025 to innovation projects in which a Swiss research institution works with a company or other implementation partner that bears 40 to 60 percent of the project cost, and held CHF 144.3 million of further commitments to such projects at the end of the year.

  • Cifre industrial doctorates

    France's research ministry has funded Cifre industrial doctorates since 1981, paying an employer 42,000 euros over three years to hire a doctoral candidate whose thesis research is run in partnership with an academic laboratory; ANRT, which operates the scheme for the ministry, accepted 1,700 new Cifre in 2025 across 1,029 distinct employers.

  • Competence Centres Programme (Kompetenscentrumprogrammet) 1995 to 2005

    Sweden's NUTEK, and later Vinnova and the Swedish Energy Agency, ran a ten-year programme from 1995 that built 28 competence centres at eight universities, each founded on a three-party contract between a university, a group of firms and the agency; more than 300 companies joined as contracting parties and industry put in 1.7 billion kronor between 1995 and 2005.

  • Doctorados Industriales (State Research Agency industrial doctorates)

    Spain's State Research Agency funds four-year contracts for doctoral candidates employed in firms and other entities to write a thesis on an industrial research or experimental development project; in the 2024-2 call, resolved in October 2025, it awarded 65 grants worth 7.6 million euros.

  • CRADLE, DOST's collaborative R&D grant for academe and companies

    From 2017 the Department of Science and Technology's CRADLE programme funded 82 projects in which a university or research institute did R&D on a problem set by a Filipino company, worth 373.6 million pesos and involving 36 HEIs or RDIs and 83 companies by early 2022.

  • Public-Private Research Network (PPRN) matching grants

    Malaysia's Ministry of Higher Education approved 680 Public-Private Research Network projects involving 634 companies by the end of 2022, with a total allocation of RM27.7 million, and 469 of them had closed as successfully completed.

  • TIA Technology Stations Programme, and its erosion

    South Africa's Technology Innovation Agency runs a network of university-based Technology Stations that gave 2,907 small firms science, engineering and technology services in 2024/25, against 3,167 at the five-year high in 2021/22, while the programme's budget fell from R105.9 million in 2020 to R93.98 million in 2025 and only 80 percent of the stations were operational.

  • CORFO Programas y Consorcios Tecnológicos

    Chile's development agency CORFO had 49 technology programmes and consortia in execution during 2024, 38 technology programmes and 11 technology consortia, the consortia joining firms with universities and technology centres in multi-year R&D portfolios, after awarding six new consortia in 2023 with 1,500 million pesos of co-financing each.

  • Manufacturing USA innovation institutes

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  • Mitacs Accelerate research internships

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  • NWO Perspectief, ended by the 2026 spring budget

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  • Government Resolution 218 complex projects for high-tech production

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  • Collaborative Research and Innovation Grant Scheme (CRIGS)

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  • COMET, Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies

    Austria's COMET programme, run by the FFG for the federal ministries and co-funded by the Länder, had approved 81 competence centres and K-projects with eligible costs of 1,669.80 million euros by 30 March 2017, in which about 450 scientific partners and about 1,000 company partners cooperated, according to the Court of Audit.

  • Centra kompetence, the Technology Agency's competence centres programme 2012 to 2019

    The Technology Agency of the Czech Republic funded 34 competence centres under its Centra kompetence programme from 2012, joining 334 participants, 115 research organisations, 118 SMEs and 101 large firms, against a planned 31 centres and 248 participants.

  • Erhvervsforsker, the Industrial PhD and Industrial Postdoc programme

    Denmark's innovation fund (Danmarks Innovationsfond, formerly Innovationsfonden) awarded 138 Industrial Researcher grants in 2025, from 252 applications and for 147.4 million kroner, each funding a researcher employed by a company and enrolled at or supervised by a university.

  • Inočekiai LT, innovation vouchers for SMEs to buy research services from universities and institutes

    Lithuania's Agency for Science, Innovation and Technology (MITA) funded 815 innovation-voucher projects in three calls from 2012 to 2014, in which small firms bought applied research, experimental development or feasibility services from universities and research institutes, and 776 of them were completed successfully.

  • Kompetences centri, the industry competence centres programme

    Latvia's six industry competence centres, funded through the Investment and Development Agency with 53.2 million euros of ERDF money, had run 231 research projects involving 164 companies and 33 scientific partners by 31 December 2014, of which 78 were completed and 44 percent involved cooperation with scientific institutions.

  • Senter for forskningsdrevet innovasjon (SFI), Centres for Research-based Innovation

    The Research Council of Norway allocated 354 million kroner in 2025 to its Centres for Research-based Innovation, eight-year consortia of research institutions, companies and public bodies whose business and public-sector partners must co-finance at least half the cost, and in December 2025 named eight new centres with 98 business partners and 22 public-sector partners.

  • ANCD innovation vouchers (Vouchere Inovationale) for SME research services

    Moldova's National Agency for Research and Development (ANCD) financed 13 innovation voucher projects in 2025, in which small and medium firms buy research and development services from research organisations, after 28 applications to the 2025-2026 call yielded 10 funded projects and four funded projects were stopped when the firms declined to sign contracts.

  • Proiect de transfer la operatorul economic (PTE) research-to-firm transfer grants

    Romania's research funding agency UEFISCDI accepted 35 firm-led projects with research organisation partners for funding in the 2024 PTE (transfer to the economic operator) competition, plus one more on a second list, after 47 in the 2021 competition.

  • Innovation Fund Collaborative Grant Scheme (Program saradnje nauke i privrede)

    Serbia's Innovation Fund financed 79 joint research and development projects of private small and medium firms with public research organisations across eight calls of its Collaborative Grant Scheme, the eighth call, decided in 2024, funding eight.

  • Innovation Consortia Matching Grant Program (Fostering Productive Innovation Project)

    Kazakhstan's innovation ministry (MDDIAI), through the Innovation Consortia Matching Grant Program of the World Bank financed Fostering Productive Innovation Project, had supported 33 technology consortia of research teams and firms, including 12 competence centres, by September 2024, whose first sales and signed contracts totalled about 17 billion tenge.

Every delivery under coordination