Eligibility

Strategic fit level 1 – Your project is in one of the funding areas Daylight Research, Forestry, Healthy Ageing, Ophthalmology, and complies with the foundation’s focus in the respective area. Please make sure you have read the information on the specific funding areas and know what we do not support therein.

Strategic fit level 2 – Impact oriented: With a limited budget the foundation focuses on new and innovative ideas, on projects that bring a change of perspective or the creation of new interdisciplinary bridges. Your vision of impact and your plans for how you will transfer the project results in order to foster change are crucial for the strategic fit.

Project scope – Your basic or applied research project will last 1 to 4 years and the budget request is around CHF 50,000-100,000 per year. For requests exceeding this amount we recommend you contact us beforehand.

Other funding sources – The application must establish why the project is not eligible for other funding sources and why you wish to be funded by Velux Stiftung. Projects that are eligible to be funded by other sources, e.g. a national funding agency (for example, the Swiss National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, etc.) have a low likelihood to go into peer review or to be funded. The project application therefore needs to establish why sufficient support cannot be obtained through other sources. Having too many grants with a national funding agency is not sufficient to bypass this criterion.

Employment – As principal investigator you must be a permanent employee of a university or another permanent organization.

Roles in project management – The principal investigator is responsible for directing the grant and the employing organisation must agree to manage the grant. The PI must be a permanent employee (e.g. professor, group leader) and act in a legally binding way on behalf of his/her organisational unit, which has to be a legal accountable entity. Non-permanent employees are welcome to apply as co-PI.

The co-PI(s) is/are key personnel who is/are essential to the project and will be involved in the project management. The number of co-PIs is limited to three persons. Co-PIs and their organisations can request parts of the budget.  However, the approved amount will be paid out to the PI’s organisation which is responsible to distribute the funds and compile the necessary reports.

Collaborators are persons you are consulting with, who will deliver input or who are significantly involved in the planned knowledge transfer. The number of collaborators is not limited.

Collaborations – The foundation welcomes interdisciplinary collaborations. While we support research worldwide, we also welcome applications from Swiss institutions or transboundary partnerships. We ask that a collaboration is clearly delineated and follows the principles for fair and equal partnership. Please check the guide for fair research partnerships of the Swiss Academies of Sciences. The approved amount will be paid out to the PI’s organisation which is responsible to distribute the funds and compile the necessary reports. In case your project involves several of our funding areas, we ask you to define the main funding area. The main funding area is defined by where your project results will contribute to change.

The foundation will first elect project applications which show a strategic fit to the foundation’s funding policy and don’t fulfil any of the exclusion criteria. Only then your project will enter the peer-review process.

The foundation’s funding criteria are based on three pillars:

• Impact
• Scientific quality
• Resources

Here we present a shortened version of the funding criteria.
The document Funding Criteria offers a more detailed description.

Impact

Originality and novelty, outside-of-the-box thinking – at best your project achieves more than the incremental development of a single discipline.

Your project addresses an important problem or a critical barrier and aims to contribute to a sustainable solution with a positive impact.

Your project is based on an original idea, that bring a change of perspective or the creation of new interdisciplinary bridges.

Your project results have the potential to cause a change and have leverage.

As PI of the project, you will design the output measures in order to maximize the knowledge transfer to the relevant target groups.

Scientific quality

If the peer-review affirms the scientific excellence of your research proposal, the board will consider your project for funding. Although scientific excellence is necessary it is not sufficient for a positive decision of the board.

To assess scientific quality as well as the suitability of the project team for the proposed research, we ask the PI and co-PI(s) to submit their CV. The CV shall underline the major achievements relevant for the proposal at hand and highlight the different categories of knowledge transfer. As a signatory of DORA, the Declaration on Research Assessment, we ask reviewers to value the full variety or research outputs in their assessment.

Resources

The project should involve people with expertise from all the necessary disciplines. The PI should show leadership to transfer the results and take advantage of the project’s potential. The project should benefit from institutional support and a productive scientific environment.

For a more detailed explanation, we recommend reading our Funding Criteria.

Project applications that fulfil one or more of the following criteria will not sent out for external peer-review and will not be funded:

• Project applications outside the strategic funding areas – Daylight Research, Forestry, Healthy Ageing, and Ophthalmology. Please read the funding areas section to see what we do not support within the funding areas.
• Project applications eligible for funding from other sources such as national funding agencies (for example, the Swiss National Foundation, National Institute of Health, etc.) The application needs to establish a convincing argument as to why no sufficient alternative support can be obtained. Having too many running grants with a national funding agency is not sufficient to bypass this criterion.
• Project applications that do not formally conform to the application template of the foundation, or that do not contain enough details to be thoroughly evaluated by an external expert.
• Project applications that do not propose concrete measures to promote the transfer of knowledge to the relevant target group(s). The project application should convincingly show how the project results will contribute to an envisioned outcome.
• Project applications that only contribute to incremental progress in the field of research. With its limited budget, the foundation focuses on projects that make a big difference.
• Project applications which have been previously rejected are not allowed for resubmission. Newly submitted projects based on the same concept or idea as a rejected project also fall into this category.