Apply for Kone Foundation Grant Program – Finland

Kone Foundation funds academic research in humanities, social sciences, and environmental sciences, artistic research, and professional artistic work. Additionally, they fund cross-disciplinary and multidisciplinary work between the fields and disciplines supported by the Foundation.

Focus Areas

• Academic and artistic freedom and the intrinsic value of research and art: They see research and art as valuable in and of themselves and not, for example, as means to generate profit. They rarely fund product development. Academic endeavors and artistic work must be developed freely on one’s own premises.
• A plurality of voices: They want different voices to be heard, and they encourage collaboration. In their funding decisions, they emphasize projects and topics that are multidisciplinary and novel and seek to challenge prevailing views.
• A project’s topic can be chosen freely, as long as the discipline is funded by the Foundation.
• Boldness: One of their central values is boldness, which includes experimentation, incompleteness, indeterminacy and a combination of unexpected approaches.
• Long term: The Foundation supports work done in peace, and emphasizes multi-year personal grants for academic and artistic work.
• Crossing borders, both national and disciplinary: They support transnationalism, which can apply to Finnish grantees working abroad or foreign grantees working in Finland. They encourage their applicants to combine research and art in multidisciplinary projects.
• Environmental sustainability: Also in projects not related to environmental issues, they take into account responsibility for the environment, especially in the context of travelling. They encourage you to use environmentally sustainable methods in your work and to favor low-emission travelling, when possible. The Foundation offers no special travel grants, so please include travel expenses in the “Other” section of your budget.

Types of project 

• The applicant must choose a category for the project:
• Research
• Art
• Research and art
• Another type of cultural work

Funding Information

• The amount of the personal monthly grant varies, depending on the stage of your career:
  • Grant 1: early career applicants in arts; researchers working on doctoral thesis €2,700 month (€32,400 year).
  • Grant 2: mid-career applicants in arts (min. 10 years of artistic work); post-doctoral researchers €3,200 month (€38,400 year).
  • Grant 3: late-career applicants in arts (min. 20 years of artistic work); experienced researchers (comparable to ‘dosentti’ in the Finnish academic system, which means that the person has, in addition to the doctoral thesis, several academic publications with the quality and scope of a doctoral thesis) €3,800 month (€45,600 year).
• If you are applying for monthly grant 2 or 3, please describe your career phase.
• Personal monthly grants are usually awarded for full-time work for a minimum of one month. Smaller grants are available (25%, 50% or 75% of full grant) for part-time work.

Eligibility Criteria

• An individual, a working group or a legal entity can apply for a grant from Kone Foundation. If you’re applying as a legal entity, you need to have a Finnish business ID. If the applicant is a working group or legal entity, the group members must choose a project leader from among themselves to be responsible for submitting the application.
• To receive funding, projects must have a connection to Finland. In general, Kone Foundation’s grants are intended for:
  • Finns, for work carried out in Finland or abroad.
  • Foreigners, for work carried out in Finland.
  • Foreigners, for project work that includes participants based in Finland.
• They welcome applicants of different ages, from different genders and from linguistic, cultural and other minorities.

For more information, visit Kone Foundation.