The report year ended with a surplus in expenditure, which will be offset by reserves. Thanks to these reserves, the SNSF is able to seamlessly maintain its research funding activities and absorb fluctuations in federal funding.
The marked increase in further contributions is attributable to the BRIDGE programme, which is co-funded by the CTI (recently renamed “Innosuisse”). After the signing of the agreement between the SNSF and the CTI, the entire co-financing was accounted for gross via the income statement for 2017. Even though the SNSF has approved more financial resources for research projects, research funding expenditure was near constant year-on-year. The reason is that the researchers will use a large part of the funding only in the future, and this has led to the expenditure being split. At the same time, the approved contributions to be accounted for over the next few years are correspondingly higher.