The expert group is involved into the process of preparation of NRP III proposal

The work on preparation of thematic priorities proposal for the National Research Program III, which is coordinated by Technology Centre AS CR in cooperation with the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports and the Research and Development Council, moved forward to the next stage. In the previous stage the Technology Centre elaborated a set of analyses of research and development in the Czech Republic, which were necessary for creation of the detailed terrain map of R&D landscape and for prediction of the R&D segments with the high probability of thematic priorities in the frame of NRP III. On the base of results of these analyses the required orientation of experts was determined and the choice of experts for the participation in the next stage of the project was done.

The expert group started its work at its first meeting, which took place in the Technology Centre building in 23rd of November. The expert group objective is to identify key opportunities and problems of the Czech Republic in application time horizon 2015 – 2020, which could be solved with the help of research supported through NRP III, and consequently to identify the related thematic research directions. The strong emphasis is put on the unfolding of the interdisciplinary relations. The experts use for their collaborative work special interactive web application. With its help they can create possible development scenarios, discuss them with colleagues and develop them further.  

The work of the expert group will be finished in March 2007 and it will be followed up with the survey of interest of the application sphere for the proposed priorities. The final version of the proposal of the NPV III priorities then will be formulated to the end of June 2007.

The assumption is that in the budget of the National Research Program III there will be gathered all the increments of R&D public funding since 2009, which should run to 1.5 billions of Czech Crowns per year approximately. These resources will be used as well for financing of R&D activities in new R&D capacities built from EU Structural Funds in years 2007-2013 (the expected sum is approximately 35 billions of Czech Crowns). The results of the project will be used also for other strategic decisions in the process of preparation of key R&D documents at the national level.