The Research Council of Finland is continuing its annual funding call to promote the economic and societal utilisation of research results. The Proof of Concept funding scheme has been prepared through a pilot call last year and will be implemented using additional funding allocated by the Finnish Government for research and development. The utilisation idea must arise from research previously funded by the Research Council. This year, the call is open to principal investigators of Academy Projects whose funding period has ended or ends between 1 January 2023 and 31 December 2024.

On 28 March 2024, the Research Council of Finland and Business Finland signed a new five-year memorandum of understanding on a programme of cooperation in scientific and technological research and innovation with the US National Science Foundation (NSF).

The Research Council of Finland’s spring 2024 call documents are now available online. Applications are invited between 3 April and 8 May 2024. The FIRI roadmap call for research infrastructures is open until 15 May.

The largest single international co-funding by the scientific councils – around 1.36 million euros – was the ERA-NET funding for research on long-term ICT challenges.

DEVELOP2, the Academy Programme for Development Research, is a research programme jointly funded by the Research Council of Finland and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. The programme provides funding for multidisciplinary, phenomenon-driven and problem-based research that is concerned with issues of global development, benefits developing countries’ economic, social and ecological development, and puts to good use Finnish knowledge and expertise.

The Research Council of Finland’s winter call 2024 closed on Wednesday 17 January with a total of 2,876 applications submitted to the funding calls that were open for application. The total number includes consortium subprojects as separate applications. If each consortium is counted as a single application, the total number of applications comes to 2,405.

The Research Council of Finland is launching a call for applications in spring 2024 with a view to strengthening research cooperation between Finnish and South Korean researchers in the fields of 6G and quantum technologies. The Research Council is earmarking 1 million euros to fund Finnish parties in the joint projects. This sum will provide funding for four three-year Finnish-South Korean projects.

The Research Council of Finland has granted 2 million euros in mobility funding to invite 24 researchers from Ukraine to Finland.

The Research Council of Finland has granted a total of 8.6 million euros for three-year projects that will explore the limits of ICT and the secure use of data in health. The funding will be divided between 25 applications, which puts the overall application success rate at 34 per cent.

The Strategic Research Council (SRC) established within the Research Council of Finland has granted a total of 27 million euros for research to be conducted under the theme ‘just green transition’. The ten consortia or sets of projects that will receive funding focus on long-term research to find solutions to key societal challenges.