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However, participation in FPs has had very little effect on the skilled human
resources within Ericsson. Although the financial impact of the FPs is not
made public, it is considered to be not large enough to have made a
quantitative impact on the number of researchers employed by the company.
In addition, Ericsson stresses that European collaborative research is only a
small part of the international R&D activities: Ericsson takes part in
collaborative R&D projects in the US, China (over 800 projects), Korea and
Japan.
Some interviewees have commented on the importance of the close
relationship between Swedish Telecom and Ericsson in jointly developing
testbeds for new generations of mobile communications. With the breaking
up of this ‘natural partnership’ after privatization of Swedish Telecoms and
the subsequent merger of Telia and Sonera, this trusted partnership for
testing new technologies changed character. However looking at the most
recent FP6-IST projects where TeliaSonera AB has participated (in total 13
projects), six of these were in partnership with Ericsson AB. Typically
TeliaSonera AB takes part in large FP6 projects involving many European
telecoms actors, it never takes the lead in a EU research project and in
almost half of the project the company teams up with Ericsson AB. The
research topics include network architectures, wireless technologies, internet
interfaces and network access technologies. Despite the difficulties in the
telecoms sector and the merger with Sonera its European R&D activities
have not decreased, as the company had a similar level of projects in FP5.
As afore mentioned there are very few smaller companies that have
participated in the Framework Programmes more than once. One of the
smaller companies interviewed was active in Framework Programme 5 and
6 in software development and particular middleware technology for
service-oriented architectures. The company has ties with universities, as
the founder and staff originated from a Stockholm research centre (SISU)
and an FP4 project in Telematics lay at the basis of the founding of this
company. It was due to their background as researchers that they were
contacted by European partners who wanted to include the company in an
FP5 project. The company would in EU projects typically focus on
prototyping software applications in interactive network architectures, while
more academic partners do longer term research. While at first the focus
was on e-learning, later participation shifted attention to mobile software
applications. The first project on e-learning led to many new insights and
knowledge, prototyping of applications, and international networks, but in
the end there was little commercial benefit in the e-learning segment of the
market. The knowledge of that project could be used as a basis for a followup
EU project, which shifted attention to mobile use of middleware
technology. The two EU projects fitted very much into a long-term
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