The IMI Fund for Applied Research, established in 1968 and active until 2001, was the most important and for a long time the only tool introduced in Italy to support research and development activities carried out by companies and thus promote their technological and organizational innovation.
Throughout its history, the responsibilities for its management and the evaluation and approval of projects submitted by companies have been gradually assigned to different entities. Companies submitted their projects and funding applications to IMI, which processed the application and sent it for final approval initially to the Interministerial Committee for Economic Planning (CIPE) and then, from 1977, to the newly established Interministerial Committee for Industrial Policy (CIPI). With the assignment, in 1982, to the Ministry for Scientific and Technological Research (MRST) of the responsibility for approving companies' research projects, the decision regarding the approval of funding applications for submitted projects was published in the Official Gazette. The data related to funding applications were then collected using the various available sources: the minutes of CIPE meetings, those of the IMI Executive Committee, and the Official Gazette. The information thus collected was appropriately reorganized into a uniform format to make it accessible and suitable for study. The resulting dataset consists of 4,935 records, corresponding to as many projects submitted by companies and funded by the IMI-FRA Fund in the period 1969-2001. Each project was assigned a two-digit sector code (Isic rev. 4) and its territorial location was identified at the provincial level. The dataset published here reports for each year, Italian province, and economic activity sector the number of projects funded and the total funding granted, expressed in thousands of 2001 euros.
For proper citation of the data, use:
C. Brambilla and F. Lavista, IMI-FRA_Rev. 1 Dataset, September 2025.