Public funding plays an important role in supporting and shaping the nature of industry-oriented strategic and applied research, and technology demonstration at both national and at European Union level. Industry is consulted on its requirement by public bodies administering these funds, but the breadth and depth of response will often be highly variable between companies. This may be less significant at the high strategic level but may have more of an impact on the details of programme and project targeting.

In many cases the public sector schemes require industry support in terms of in-kind or financial contributions. Especially in far-from-market strategic and applied research projects, E&P companies will often receive unsolicited requests for support from researchers. While participation in part publicly funded programmes provides new research results to companies, with the added benefit of being able to share the associated costs, the real business benefit depends on the closeness of the match between the company's strategic and/or asset requirements and the leveraged research opportunity on offer.

Although a full treatment of public sector schemes is beyond the scope of this report, reference is made here to the science, engineering and technology focus of two major public sector initiatives relevant to the E&P industry, namely the European Union's Fourth Framework Programme (1994-98), in particular its JOULE-THERMIE Programme, and to the UK Government's Technology Foresight Programme. The topics targeted by these schemes are listed in synoptic form in Table 22.