Pilot-T: New Mobility Solutions

This call is open to companies that have been issued an enterprise number under the Norwegian Register of Business Enterprises and that carry out economic activity in Norway. The applicant must either be a private company or a public enterprise that carries out activities of an industrial or business nature. We will use the collective term ‘company’ in the rest of the call for proposals.

Groups of companies, e.g. industry organisations, sole proprietorships, research organisations and other organisations, are not eligible to apply for funding.

Requirements relating to the Project Owner

The Project Owner must secure funding for the project (over and above the Research Council’s funding) and make provisions for utilisation of the project results.

Requirements relating to R&D providers

The Project Owner must procure services from at least one R&D provider.

• Norwegian and/or foreign research organisations must participate in the project as R&D providers with responsibility for performing R&D work on assignment for the company(ies) in the project. Norwegian research organisations must be on the list of approved research organisations: Approved research organisations (forskningsradet.no), whereas foreign research organisations must be an institute, university college, university or equivalent institution.
• R&D providers may not contribute to project funding, and in general have no rights to the project results. They deliver work on assignment and are paid for this work at market price. If an R&D provider will nevertheless have rights to project results, the price of the agreed assignment can be adjusted by deducting the market value of the rights from the price.
• The scope of the R&D provider’s role in the project is based on the Project Owner’s and partners’ needs. Therefore, no requirements apply to the scope of work. The R&D provider’s role in the project must be clearly described in the grant application.
• You can also procure research services from international or Norwegian expert environments that are not research organisations (cf. the first bullet point), but this in itself does not fulfil the requirements relating to R&D providers.

Requirements relating to partners

The Project Owner must carry out the project in collaboration with one or more Norwegian companies or public enterprises. Your grant application must clearly describe the role of partners and their motivation for participating in the project. Partners must be involved in what is known as an effective collaboration with the Project Owner, which entails sharing both the risk associated with the project and the results it generates. One or both of the following requirements must be met:

• The Project Owner can carry out the project in cooperation with other companies if these companies either cover their own costs in full or make use of Pilot-T project funding. Partners must fulfil the criteria listed under ‘Who is eligible to apply?’ to meet the cooperation requirement. Partners whose project costs are covered in part by Research Council funding are recipients of state aid.
• The Project Owner can carry out the project in collaboration with other public sector enterprises. Public enterprises cannot receive funding from the Research Council under this call. This means that they must cover their own project costs in full.

Please note that research organisations cannot be partners (they must be R&D providers, cf. the previous heading). Other Norwegian or international partners may be involved in the project, but their costs will not be eligible for Pilot-T funding and the partner must cover its own costs in full. Any international partners must be registered in the grant application form as a collaborating partner, but their costs should be NOK 0 in all the budget tables. However, their costs and how these are to be financed should be described in the specification field below the relevant budget tables.

The application with relevant partners and R&D providers at the time the application is submitted forms the basis for grant allocation. Any changes to the composition of a project before a contract has been entered into must be approved by the Research Council. The changes may result in the Research Council withdrawing its offer of funding.

Roles in the project

The number of partners in the project will not determine whether it is successful. A good project, on the other hand, is characterised by each partner having defined tasks and a clear role in the project.

The Project Owner or partners cannot be in a situation where they can exert a controlling influence on an R&D provider. Nor can an R&D provider exert a controlling influence on the Project Owner or partners. By controlling influence is meant majority ownership or other concrete judicial or actual circumstances that mean that one company can control the other. An R&D provider must be an external source that delivers its services in accordance with the arm’s length principle.

The Project Owner and partners must be independent of each other, and none of them may exercise a controlling influence on the others.

Funding for Pilot-T projects is awarded in accordance with the EEA state aid rules, more specifically Article 25 of the General Block Exemption Regulation for state aid (Commission Regulation (EU) No 651/2014). Among other things, this means that:

• Funding is only available for project costs relating to R&D activities. Activities that are eligible for funding include, but are not limited to, applied research, prototyping, demonstration and pilot testing.
• Costs for other types of activities and measures to exploit R&D results, such as filing for patents, market surveys and marketing, testing and completion of new products and services are not approved for funding.
• The level of funding (aid intensity) is subject to limitations and will depend on the project’s R&D content. Activities classified as “industrial research” are eligible for a higher aid intensity than “experimental development” activities.
• Other public funding of the costs eligible for funding will affect the amount of Pilot-T funding that can be granted.
• Notification of all state aid allocated to the project will be published on the Research Council’s website, and allocated state aid of EUR 500,000 or more will be listed in a public registry.

The call for proposals has been approved as an aid scheme by the EFTA Surveillance Authority (ESA) with the reference: GBER 51/2022/R&D&I.

Parts of the companies’ costs pertaining to R&D activities under the project qualify for funding. Funding can be provided for both direct and indirect project costs to the extent they can be categorised as costs pertaining to industrial research or experimental development. This applies to costs associated with R&D activities carried out by the project partners, and to costs incurred in connection with purchase of R&D services from R&D providers.

You will find detailed and important information about what to enter in the project budget on our website.

Scope of funding

The amount of funding that may be applied for is limited to a minimum of NOK 2 million and a maximum of NOK 10 million for a project period between one and three years.

The scope of funding for the company’s project costs depends on the size of the company and the type of R&D activities to be carried out:

A higher aid intensity than shown in the table above will not be granted.

The Research Council of Norway

The Research Council provides funding for projects where new knowledge and testing and/or piloting are needed to implement new technology and new services and business models. We can fund projects where the solution will be ready for the market at the end of the project, but also projects that are part of a prolonged development process. This includes projects where more research or development is needed also after the end of the project.

Pilot-T projects funded by the Research Council must include procurement of research and development services from an R&D organisation and cooperation with other companies or public enterprises.

Innovation Norway

Innovation Norway provides funding for market-based innovation projects that generate value creation in Norway. This may involve new use of existing knowledge as well as projects that comprise development, demonstration and/or testing solutions on the market.

If you are not sure where to apply, contact us for information and guidance.

Contact persons (Research Council)

• Mette Brest Jonassen, tel.: (+47) 951 80 531 mbjo@forskningsradet.no
• Lise Johansen, tel.: (+47) 954 82 607 lj@forskningsradet.no

Contact person (Innovation Norway)

• Silje Horrisland Whist, tel.: (+47) 22 00 25 00, Silje.Horrisland.Whist@innovasjonnorge.no

Please note that the Research Council and Innovation Norway will process the applications they receive, respectively, but that applications may be made available to case officers in both organisations when this is appropriate and in consultation with the applicant. If a company submits an application to both organisations, the applications will be checked to determine whether they are identical.

You may revise and resubmit your application form multiple times up to the submission deadline for applications. We recommend that you submit your application as soon as you have filled in the grant application form and included all mandatory attachments. After the deadline, it is the most recently submitted version of the grant application that will be processed.

• The application and all attachments must be written in Norwegian or English.
• All attachments must be uploaded in PDF format. The designated templates found at the end of the call must be used for all mandatory attachments.
• The project description must be written using the designated template, and all sections must be completed.
• The earliest permitted start date for the project is 1 March 2023.
• The latest permitted start date for the project is 1 September 2023.
• The latest permitted completion date for the project is 31 August 2026.
• At least one R&D provider must be included the grant application form.
• At least one Norwegian partner (company or public enterprise) must be included in the grant application form.
• Any other R&D providers or partners must also be registered in the grant application form.

Mandatory attachments

• A project description, maximum 10 pages.
• A partner information form for the company submitting the grant application and each of the partner companies
• The CV of the project manager
• The CVs of key project participants who will perform important R&D activities for the project

Applications that do not meet the requirements listed above will be rejected.

Optional attachments

• We encourage you to submit a proposal for up to three (Scandinavian) referees who are considered impartial and qualified to assess the application.

All requirements set out in the call must be met. Applications that do not meet the formal requirements, or requirements relating to the Project Owner, collaboration and roles in the project, will not be considered.

All attachments must be submitted together with the application. We will not accept attachments submitted after the deadline for applications unless we have requested further information.

We will not assess documents and websites linked to in the application, or other attachments than those specified above. There is no technical validation of the content of uploaded attachments, so please ensure that you upload the correct file for the selected type of attachment.

Please note that you are not to enclose letters of intent.

We assess applications in light of the objectives of the application type in question and on the basis of the following criteria:

We will prioritise projects that

• have a high degree of innovation
• have a female project manager when the applications are otherwise considered to be on a par

The application and mandatory attachments will be made available in a digital portal for referees who will perform an assessment of the criteria ‘Excellence’, ‘Impact’ and ‘Implementation’. The referees will convene in a panel meeting to reach a consensus-based assessment of the grant application for each of these three criteria.

If the mark awarded by the referee panel for all of the criteria is 4 or higher on a scale where 7 is the highest mark, the application will be assessed by the Research Council’s case officers also on the basis of the criterion “Relevance to the call for proposals”. The assessment of the relevance criterion will attach importance to the project’s contribution to the creation of an efficient, environmentally friendly and safe transport system through the accelerated application of effective solutions.

The assessment and marks for all four criteria will be consolidated into a single, overall mark that indicates the merit of the application.

We will then draw up a recommendation based on an overall assessment of the project portfolio, which will then form the basis for the portfolio board’s funding decisions. The Portfolio board will emphasise achieving a balanced portfolio of projects within their area of responsibility, including in relation to ongoing projects.

See also: How we process applications.

We expect to publish which applications have been awarded funding in February/March 2023.