Who can apply

We fund people, not projects alone

We look for research that is already close to practical application but not yet ready for the business world

A grant is always sought by an experienced researcher, most often a professor or the leader of a research group. The applicant must in every case hold a doctoral degree. The funding offers the salary of a doctoral researcher or postdoctoral researcher to work on the project full time, typically for three years. The researcher hired with the funding is employed by their own university or research institute and does not receive a personal grant. In practice this means a young researcher can carry out sustained work on a secure footing from the very start of their career. The research group leader, in turn, gains the means to take a larger body of work forward with a capable researcher.

Criteria

A strong application contains the following three things, and none of them should be missing.

Economic applicability

There must be an identifiable path in the research toward a commercial application. A patent, a demonstrated technology, an improvement to a process or the adoption of a new material are all examples of where the results may lead. A finished product is not required at the research stage, but the applicant must be able to explain how the work will ultimately benefit companies and society.

Relevance to Finnish natural resources

The results must benefit Finnish natural resources and their sustainable use. The researcher may be Finnish or international, and the work may in some cases be carried out abroad, but the benefit must reach Finland and its natural resources. This is an absolute condition of the funding, so applicants should set out clearly how their research connects to the use of Finnish natural resources in particular.

Scientific quality

The project must meet academic standards. We assess the expertise of the research group, its publication record and the scientific quality of the application. Although our emphasis is on more applied research, scientific ambition matters too.

The funding in practice

  • The funding period is typically three years, which makes a whole doctoral project or a sustained postdoctoral project possible.
  • The funding is paid to the applicant organisation, and the researcher hired with it is employed there.
  • The project’s progress against its plan is reviewed annually.

The selection process

The decision is reached in two stages. The board first reviews all the applications received and selects for further assessment those that best match SLTS’s funding priorities. A scientific working group then carries out a more detailed assessment and scores the selected applications on the basis of, for example, the project’s inventiveness, its scientific quality, its applicability and the capabilities of the applicant and supervisors. The final funding decisions are made by the board based on the working group’s proposal.

Any conflicts of interest are taken into account at every stage of the assessment.