Joint Call for Proposals with Brazil for Research and Technology Development in the Industrial Sector

The applicant must be registered in the Norwegian Register of Business Enterprises and have 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. In the rest of the call, we use the collective term "company". 

The applicant company will be the Project Owner in the contract with the Research Council. 

Sole proprietorships and research organisations are not eligible to serve as an applicant.

Requirements relating to the Project Owner 

The Project Owner must secure project funding (in addition to Research Council funding) and implement other measures necessary to utilise the project results for innovation purposes in its own activities. 

Requirements relating to collaboration and roles in the project 

The Project Owner (company) must carry out the project together with a Brazilian company. This partner must be listed as a partner in the application form submitted to the Research Council (the Brazilian partner will be registered in the application as a "task-performing" partner). The Brazilian partner must be the applicant for funding from Finep. In the application form to the Research Council, you should not list any other participants on the Brazilian side as partners. This information will be provided in the mandatory attachment to the application. 

The Project Owner (company) may carry out the project in effective collaboration with other companies (company partners) in Norway. These will have parts of their project costs covered through our support and will become recipients of state aid. As a rule, such business partners must fulfil the criteria listed under 'Who is eligible to apply?' in order to be eligible to receive support. 

Norwegian and international expert communities and research organisations may participate in the project as R&D providers responsible for performing R&D work commissioned by the companies participating in the project. R&D providers are not required to contribute to project funding, and therefore do not normally have any rights to the project results. They deliver work on assignment, and get paid for this work at market price. If an R&D supplier nevertheless retains rights to the project results, the price of the agreed assignment may be adjusted by deducting the market value of the relevant rights from the price. Here you can read more about partners and R&D providers. 

Other international and public sector actors may participate in the project but will not receive support from the Research Council. These must not be entered as partners in the application form. This type of collaboration can be described in the project description under section 3.3 "Other collaboration". 

Project partners must be defined as either "funding and task-performing" (company partners that contribute in-kind contributions) or "task-performing" (fully funded research organisation or company that is the provider of R&D services to participate in the project). 

The Project Owner or partners may not be dependent on an R&D provider in the project. The Project Owner and partners must also be independent of each other. This means that one cannot have controlling influence over the other. This applies both between the Project Owner and partners and between all partners. Read more about such dependencies here. 

The collaboration constellation in the project is expected to provide a basis for long-term cooperation, development and dissemination of knowledge and effective mutual utilisation of the results. 

The Research Council can provide funding for project costs related to R&D activities performed under the project. The Research Council does not provide funding for operational activities and measures to exploit the R&D results, such as protection of intellectual property rights, market surveys and marketing, testing and completion of new products and services. Therefore, you must not include such costs in the project budget. 

The Research Council can provide funding to cover some of the costs incurred by companies for R&D activities performed under the project. This applies to support for costs associated with R&D activities carried out by the company itself, and to costs incurred in connection with the purchase of R&D services from R&D suppliers. 

Project costs are actual costs of the project and can include: 

• direct project costs, which are costs associated with the implementation of the project, such as payroll expenses for project staff 
• indirect project costs, which are costs associated with the project's share of the rent for offices, IT/telephone and joint administrative services for personnel and finances 

In the grant application form, the project budget must be broken down into the following cost categories: 

• payroll and indirect expenses, which are costs associated with the company's own R&D activities under the project. See our policy for Budgeting of payroll and indirect expenses. 
• procurement of R&D services, which are costs associated with engaging R&D providers 
• equipment, which are operating and depreciation costs for scientific equipment that the project is dependent on using 
• other operating expenses, which is associated with other activities that are necessary to carry out the project's R&D activities 

The budgeted project costs must be in accordance with the description in Article 25 (3) of the General Block Exemption Regulation. 

Scope of funding 

You can apply for funding to cover up to 50 per cent of the costs of each of the companies in the project. The level of support available for a 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 as defined in The state aid rules. Bonuses are only given for company size, pursuant to Article 25 (6) a. Please note that we do not make full use of the room for manoeuvre in the state aid rules. In this way, we canallocate funding for more projects. This means that you can also receive support for the project from other public schemes, such as Innovation Norway and Hoards. 

Do you also intend to apply for support from SkatteFUNN for your project? Read more here about this opportunity and assumptions on the website: Incentive effect and combination of instruments (in Norwegian). 

Please note that you cannot apply for innovation funding for a project that has already started. 

Conditions for funding 

This call for proposals constitutes a funding scheme that is notified to the EFTA Surveillance Authority (ESA) with the reference: GBER 31/2024/R&D&I. 

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

See the General Block Exemption Regulation for state aid in a consolidated version with amendments from July 2023 (the page opens in a new window). The scheme is to be practised in accordance with the EEA state aid rules. Conditions and concepts are to be interpreted in keeping with corresponding conditions and concepts in the state aid rules. In the event of conflict between the text of the call and the state aid rules, the latter shall take precedence. For the same reason, the call may also be adjusted. 

State aid may not be awarded to an undertaking that has not fulfilled the repayment requirement pursuant to a prior decision by the EFTA Surveillance Authority/the European Commission where the aid has been declared to be illegal and incompatible with the internal market. Nor may aid be awarded to undertakings in difficulties under EEA law. 

If the project is awarded funding, you must revise the application. The revised grant application must include updated and supplementary information about the project and the partners, including documentation of implementation capacity and own financing. The companies participating in the project must also submit a declaration confirming that they are eligible to receive state aid. 

In addition, you must be aware of the following if you should receive a grant from us: 

• The project will commence no later than four months after the award notification will be announced. Projects that have been approved for funding, but have not started within this time, may lose their allocation. 
• You must send us an annual project account report documenting incurred costs and how they are financed. 
• Other public funding to the project, or to activities under the project, may affect the amount of funding provided by the Research Council. 
• If you receive state aid from us equivalent to EUR 100 000 or more, we will make this known in the Norwegian Register of State Aid (the page opens in a new window). 
• You must inform any partners listed on the stock exchange or that have applied to be admitted to trading as soon as possible, so that they can assess whether the allocation of funding constitutes sensitive information on the stock exchange. 
• The Research Council's terms and conditions for awards can be found in our General Terms and Conditions for R&D Projects on the information page This is what the contract consists of. 
• 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 grant application. Here you will find more information about requirements for data management plans in projects that receive funding from us. 
• For medical and health-related studies involving human participants, the Research Council stipulates special requirements and guidelines for prospective registration of studies and publication of results. 

Funding will be disbursed in arrears on the basis of an EHF invoice sent by the Project Owner. You will receive more information about this if the project should receive funding from us. 

All reporting shall be done electronically. 

Support from the Research Council is to cover parts of the costs incurred only by the Project Owner and the Norwegian partners in the project. In the budgets in the application form, you must therefore only include costs and funding for the Norwegian part of the collaborative project. The cost and financing amounts on the Brazilian side will be included in the mandatory attachment to the application. 

The application must be created and submitted via "My RCN Web". You can amend and submit the application several times up to the application deadline. We recommend that you submit the application as soon as you have completed the application form and uploaded the mandatory attachments. When the application deadline expires, it is the version of the application that was submitted most recently that we will process. 

• An application describing the same project must be submitted to Finep by the Brazilian company responsible for the Brazilian part of the collaborative project. An application submitted only in one of the countries will be rejected. 
• The grant application and all attachments must be submitted in English. 
• All attachments must be in PDF format and uploaded as attachments in the application form. You will find all application templates at the end of this call. 
• The project description must follow a designated template and all points must be answered. 
• Project costs are to be budgeted in accordance with the Research Council's budgeting guidelines. 

Mandatory attachments 

• Project description of 10 pages. Use the default template. 
• Partner information for the applicant company (Project Owner) and for each of the partner companies (company partners). Use the default template. 
• "Joint call Finep RCN mandatory attachment (2023)" which you can download at the bottom of the page. 
• CVs for project managers and key project staff. Use the default template. 

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

All attachments to the application must be submitted with the application. We will not accept attachments submitted after the application deadline unless we have requested additional documentation. 

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

Applications from the Norwegian applicants will be evaluated by the Research Council in cooperation with external referees. In addition to this, an overall portfolio assessment will form the basis for the ranked list of project applications approved by the portfolio board committee for energy and transport.    The final funding decision will be made in a dialogue between the Research Council and Finep. Preliminary results from the dialogue between Finep and the Research Council will be published at the end of September 2024. The final results will come at the end of October 2024. See The Joint Call Finep RCN 2024 document for more information.