Network analysis reveals growing collaboration but persistent core dominance in European space research, highlighting limits in leadership decentralization.
Key Points
To examine the structural evolution of the European space-technology knowledge network from 2014 to 2025 and evaluate whether peripheral and intermediate countries gained collaboration depth and leadership relative to established core nations.
Analyzed CORDIS metadata from 7,754 collaborative R&D projects comprising 23,167 unique participating organizations across 60 countries over four 3-year periods.
Constructed country-level networks across three layers: joint-project co-participation, organizational involvement depth, and formal consortium coordination leadership.
Classified countries into core, intermediate-potential, and peripheral categories to evaluate trajectories, weighted degree centrality, and core-linkage ratios longitudinally.
Germany, France, Italy, and Spain maintained central dominance across all three network layers and led the strongest collaboration dyads throughout 2014–2025.
Intermediate-potential countries demonstrated statistically significant increases in project-based and organization-based weighted degree centrality, but achieved no significant gains in coordination-based leadership centrality.
Intermediate countries decreased their organizational core-linkage ratio over time by expanding partnerships outside the four core nations, though overall structural dependence on core countries persisted.
Cite This Study
Papaefstathiou et al. (2026) studied this question.