Innovation Project for the Industrial Sector 2024

The Project Owner must be registered in the Norwegian Register of Business Enterprises and have economic activity in Norway. By economic activity, we mean offering goods or services in a market. This entails that the Project Owner must either be a private company, or a public enterprise that conducts activities of an industrial or commercial nature. In the rest of the call, we use the collective term "company". 

Sole proprietorships cannot be Project Owners, but they can be partners.

Requirements relating to the Project Owner 

The Project Owner must secure funding for the project (in addition to the Research Council's funding) and make provisions for utilisation of the project results. 

Requirements relating to collaboration and roles in the project 

We require cooperation in this call. Thus, the Project Owner must carry out the project together with at least one partner (company) or purchase commissioned research from at least one R&D supplier. You must register these under "Partners and R&D providers" in the application form.  

All partners must have defined tasks and a clear role in the implementation of the project. 

The Project Owner and partners must be independent of each other. This means that one cannot have a controlling influence over the other. This applies both between the Project Owner and the partner, and between all the partners. 

Nor can the R&D provider have a controlling influence over the Project Owner/partners or vice versa.  

Read more about such dependencies here. 

• The relevant partners and R&D providers at the time the application is submitted form the basis for our assessment of the application, and their participation in the project is a stringent condition for funding. If you change the composition of the project before we enter into a contract with you, we may withdraw our funding pledge. 

Partners 

• Companies that are to be partners must meet the criteria under "Who can apply?" in order to participate in the project and receive funding. Partners enter into effective collaboration with the Project Owner, which means, among other things, that they share both the risks in the project and the results that derive from it. Read more about effective cooperation under Article 25: Important definitions. Partners whose project costs are covered by our support will be recipients of state aid. 
• All partners must have identified costs in the project, but they can choose not to have the costs covered through our award. 
• Although sole proprietorships cannot be the Project Owner for applications under this call, they may be partners. For such companies, there are separate rules for which costs we can cover. 

R&D Providers 

• Norwegian and foreign research organisations and other expert communities can participate in the project as R&D suppliers, with responsibility for carrying out R&D work on behalf of the companies in the project. R&D providers are not required to contribute to financing the project, and therefore do not normally have rights to the project results. They deliver work on commission and are paid for this work at market price. If an R&D provider is nevertheless to take part in the rights to the project results, the price of the agreed assignment must be adjusted by deducting the market value of the rights from the price. 
• Where doctoral work is part of the R&D provider's work on the project, you may not impose restrictions on the publication of the doctoral work, except for any pre-agreed postponement of the date of publication. 
• Since the research organisations’ work in the innovation projects is procured through an assignment, such work, when assigned to universities and university colleges, will be classified as commissioned R&D. This means that work performed by PhD candidates may also be invoiced in accordance with market price and that the purchase of such work is not tied to the Research Council's lump sum for research fellows. Research fellows who carry out work in these projects do not have the same rights to cover stays abroad as research fellows who are wholly or partly funded by the Research Council. 

Other partners  

International and public actors can participate in the project, but you must not include them as partners in the application form. Instead, you should mention this type of collaboration in the project description, under section 3.2 or 3.3. 

Read more about collaboration agreements, partners and R&D providers. 

You can apply for funding to cover the actual costs necessary to carry out the project. The Project Owner must obtain information on costs from the partners in the project. These costs must be entered in the cost plan under the cost type to which they belong.  

The following cost types should be used:  

1. Payroll and indirect costs 
2. Procurement of R&D 
3. Equipment  
4. Other operating costs 

You can find detailed information about the costs we can cover here. 

We do not provide support for activities that are not directly related to the implementation of the project – e.g. operating costs – or for measures to exploit the R&D results, such as the protection of intellectual property rights, market research and marketing, and testing (except as falling under the definition of experimental development) and the completion of new products and services. We will not provide support for costs that will not be recorded in the Project Owner's or partners' official accounts, such as unpaid work input. You must therefore not include such costs in the project budget. 

Scope of funding 

You can find information about how much funding you can apply for under the various thematic texts further down in the call. 

Article 25 of the EU Block Exemption Regulation describes in more detail which activities can be supported and which costs of these activities can be covered in whole or in part. Funding may cover direct and indirect project costs to the extent that they are costs related to industrial research or experimental development.  

Read more about state aid here: Article 25: Support for research and development projects. 

Projects that will primarily test new technology (previously called demonstration projects in the business sector) will mainly include experimental development. Such projects must demonstrate and verify a specific innovation in the companies participating in the project. Demonstration and qualification must be carried out under real conditions, and a clear and concise plan for this must be included in the project description. 

You can apply for funding for up to 50 per cent of the costs of each of the companies in the project. The degree of support for the company's project costs within the framework of 50 per cent depends on the size of the company and the type of R&D activities.

Please note that we do not support companies to the full extent of what is possible within the framework of the state aid rules. In not doing so, we are able to fund more projects. The state aid rules allow small businesses to have up to 70 per cent of their costs for industrial research covered. For medium-sized companies, the state aid rules allow for coverage of up to 60 per cent for the same costs. Under this call we do not, however, allow for more than 50 per cent of such costs to be covered for either type of company, even if all activities are defined as industrial research 

• Example 1, a small company with all the costs within the category Industrial research: The state aid rules indicate that public support can contribute 70 per cent of the costs, but we will only cover 50 per cent through this particular call. 
• Example 2, a medium-sized company with all the costs within the Experimental development category: The state aid rules indicate that state aid can cover 35 per cent of the costs, and that is what we will cover. 
• Example 3, a small company with half of the costs within the Industrial research category and half within Experimental development: The state aid rules indicate that state aid can cover 57.5 per cent of the total costs, but we only cover up to 47.5 per cent of them. 
• Example 4, a medium-sized company with half of the costs within Industrial research and half within Experimental development: The state aid rules indicate that state aid can cover 47.5 per cent of the costs, but we only cover up to 42.5 per cent of them. 

The fact that the Research Council only allocates up to 50 per cent to industrial research, even though the company could have been covered by up to 70 per cent, means that you can apply for top-up funding from other public schemes, such as Innovation Norway and SkatteFUNN.  

The final amount and percentage of support will be determined when we enter into a contract with you. 

Conditions for funding 

Conditions related to state aid: 

This call constitutes an aid scheme that must be notified to the EFTA Surveillance Authority (ESA) and has the reference: GBER 114/2024/R&D&I. 

The aid under the scheme is awarded in accordance with Article 25 of the Block Exemption Regulation (Commission Regulation (EU) No 651/2014). In addition, the general conditions in Chapter I of the Regulation must be met.  

See the Consolidated Block Exemption Regulation with amendments up to and including July 2021  (link opens in a new window). The scheme shall be practiced in accordance with the EEA Agreement's state aid rules. Terms and concepts shall be interpreted in accordance with the corresponding terms and concepts in the aid rules. In the event of any conflict between the call and the state aid rules, the latter shall take precedence. For the same reason, the call for proposals may also be adjusted. 

Aid may not be granted to undertakings that have not complied with the requirements for repayment following a previous decision by the ESA/EU Commission declaring the aid illegal and incompatible with the internal market. Nor may aid be granted to undertakings in difficulty within the meaning of EEA law. 

Other conditions: 

If the company is granted funding for their project, the application must be revised. The revised application must include updated and supplementary information about the project and the partners, including documentation of implementation capacity and own funding. The companies in the project must also submit a self-declaration confirming that they are entitled to receive state aid. Read more about state aid under the heading "Conditions for funding". 

In addition, you must be aware of the following if you are awarded funding from us: 

• The latest date for the start of the project will be four months after notification of the award. Projects that have not started by this time may lose the grant. 
• Other public funding for the project, or for activities included in the project, may affect the scope of the Research Council's funding. 
• If you receive state aid from us that is equivalent to EUR 100,000 or more, we will make it known in the Register for State Aid (link opens in a new window). 
• The Research Council's conditions for funding can be found in our general terms and conditions for R&D projects on the information page What the contract involves. 
• The Research Council requires full and immediate open access for scientific articles, see Plan S - open access to publications. 
• For all projects that handle data, the Project Owner must prepare a data management plan in connection with the revised application. Here you will find more information about requirements for data management plans in projects that receive funding from us. 
• For medical and health studies involving humans, the Research Council sets special requirements and guidelines for prospective registration of studies and publication of results. 

You must submit an annual project accounting report documenting the costs incurred and how they are financed.  

We disburse the funds in arrears. You will receive more information about this if the project should be awarded funding from us. 

All reporting must be done electronically. 

The application must be created and submitted via My RCN Web. The application and all attachments must be written in Norwegian or English. 

This call has ongoing application reception from 15 August. Please note that you can only submit the application once. If you submit the application and shortly afterwards see that it still needs to be changed, you can create a new application, e.g., as a copy of the one you have already submitted. However, this must be done before the times stated under About the call > When can you apply. 

• All attachments must be in PDF format and uploaded as attachments in the application form. You will find all application templates at the bottom of the call.  
• Applications for projects that primarily will test new technology (demonstration projects, formerly known as DEMO2000), should include letters of intent (LoI) from all registered partners. The LoI must include an account of why the project is important to them, as well as a description of the financial and/or academic commitment of the project.  
• In the application form, you must state whether you have applied for funding for the same eligible costs through other calls for proposals from the Research Council or from other donors. 
• All project costs must be budgeted in accordance with the Research Council's guidelines for budgeting. 

Mandatory attachments 

• Project description of a maximum of 10 pages.  
• Partner details for the Project Owner and for each of the partners. A maximum of one page for each form.  
• CV for the project manager and other key project staff (e.g. responsible for the project's work packages). You can submit a maximum of five CVs per application, and each CV must be a maximum of four pages. 

Note that the project description and partner details templates are new for 2024. 

All requirements in the call must be met. Applications that do not meet the design requirements or requirements relating to the Project Owner and requirements relating to collaboration and roles in the project will be rejected. Applications that are submitted to the wrong thematic areas and after the stated application deadline will also be rejected. You must use standard templates for all required attachments. The templates can be found at the bottom of the call.   

We will not consider attachments other than those specified above, or documents and websites linked to in the application. The system does not do any technical validation on the content of the attachments you upload, so make sure to upload the correct file for the correct attachment type. 

Applications will be assessed considering the purpose of the call and the following criteria:

Once the applications have been received, the Research Council will first check that all formal requirements have been met. Applications that do not meet the formal requirements will be rejected, and applications that meet the requirements will be processed by external experts who will assess them individually based on the criteria "Excellence", "Impact " and "Implementation". Each application is assessed by at least three professionals. 

The grading scale for the criteria goes from 1 to 7, where 7 is best. After the professionals have made their individual assessments, we calculate an average of the grades per application. 

For the topic Industry and service industries, applications with an average score of more than 5.5 will be processed further without further discussion between the experts. In the same topic, applications with an average of between 5.5 and 5.0 and applications with an average of more than 4.5, where at least one of the referees has assessed the application as 6 or better, will be further assessed in panel meetings by the aforementioned referees. At the panel meeting, they will arrive at a consensus assessment of the application for each of the three criteria. 

For the other topics, applications for which the average mark for the individual assessments is 4.5 or higher will be assessed at panel meetings. Here, applications between 4.0 and 4.5 will also be assessed on average at such meetings, provided that at least one referee has assessed the application at 6 or better. 

Applications with an average mark below those mentioned above will not be further assessed in panel meetings. 

If the referee panel then assesses all criteria for a mark of 4 or higher, the application will also be assessed on the basis of the criterion "Relevance to the call" by Research Council case officers. Note that the topic Industry and service industries does not assess relevance. The assessment of the above-mentioned criteria is summarized in an overall mark as an overall expression of the quality of the application. 

Finally, it is the Research Council's portfolio boards that decide whether the projects should be rejected or awarded funding. 

 Expected notification of the application results 

The earlier you submit, the sooner you can receive an answer. For the thematic area Industry and service industries, the latest allocations will be published in the first quarter of 2025. For all other thematic areas, the latest allocations will be published in December 2024.  

The first permitted project start is 1 January 2025. 

See also:  How we process applications.