CFPs: Network Grant for Planning Future Excellence Clusters for Groundbreaking Technologies in Sweden

The Swedish Research Council and Vinnova share the goal of realizing the government’s large-scale vision of world-leading excellence clusters for groundbreaking technologies. The agencies will coordinate their work throughout the initiative. The clusters are intended to become leaders in strategic areas of groundbreaking technology, in order to strengthen expertise and competitiveness of Swedish industry.

The grant must be reported back to the Swedish Research Council after six months.

Objectives

• What may constitute a future cluster of excellence, as well as what can be included in such a cluster, may vary across different fields, within the following framework:
  • Each cluster must involve a substantial and focused investment of tens of million SEK (at least 40) per cluster and year.
  • The clusters must represent collaborations between higher education institutions with the aim of enabling research of the highest scientific quality within each technological area and pushing the frontiers forward to achieve international leadership in those fields.
  • To enhance understanding of the interaction between new technologies, societal development, and international relations, each cluster of excellence must also include funding for social science and humanities research that explores opportunities, barriers, and risks, as well as research on international security policy related to emerging technologies.

Focus Areas

• Subject areas:
  • Humanities and Social Sciences
  • Medicine and Health
  • Natural and Engineering Sciences
  • Educational Sciences

Funding Information

• Grant amount: 1,200,000 SEK per grant
• Duration: 6 months.

Eligibility Criteria

• The applicant for a network grant must be an individual researcher together with their organisation (a Swedish higher education institution (HEI) or another Swedish organisation that fulfils their criteria for administrating organisations for Swedish Research Council grants). They must have approved your organisation as an administrating organisation for you to apply.
• You must hold a Swedish doctoral degree or an equivalent foreign degree, awarded no later than the deadline for this call. For applicants with Swedish doctoral degrees, the issue date of the degree registered in Ladok applies.
• You shall be the project leader and have responsibility for the activities described. The time you set aside for the project (your activity level, that is the percentage of a full-time equivalent) must be suited to the task and its implementation throughout the grant period.
• You do not have to be employed by the administrating organisation at the time of applying, but you must be employed at the start of and throughout the grant period and any further availability period. The employment must equal at least 20 per cent of a full-time equivalent.

Ineligibility Criteria

• Planned clusters may, but are not required to, include:
  • research infrastructure
  • international collaborations
  • strategies for future recruitment
  • doctoral programmes.

Application Requirements

• In the summary of the planning description, you should briefly describe the following:
  • Research area and relevance
  • Networks and collaboration
  • Forms of cooperation and planned activities.

For more information, visit Swedish Research Council.