[dagw]

The only European country where I'm somewhat familiar with research funding is Sweden and at least there direct corporate funding is a tiny sliver of the overall university research budget. And even when companies do fund research projects much of the funding is things like letting their researchers work 'for free' on the project or giving free access to data, equipment and licenses rather than cash

[krageon]

I only really know two northwestern (European) countries and they are both not Sweden. Corporate funding there is "strings attached" money, both for direction and scope of the research (and in at least one case a final say on whether or not research gets published). Corporate funding is also somewhat expected, as working from just government money is a huge outlier (it is not enough).

It's interesting to see that policies differ so much even inside of the relatively wealthy parts of Europe :)

[dagw]

To clarify slightly. Corporate 'co-funding' and cooperation is not uncommon in projects (and is in fact a requirement for funding in many cases), but the amount of actual cash this adds up to is a tiny percentage of the overall national university research budgets.