Funding Policy
The path to impact.
The foundation aims to contribute to sustainable change and impact for the benefit of humankind. While there are many important and unsolved topics in the supported funding areas, Velux Stiftung focuses on those ideas or challenges which are relevant, but have been neglected by the system, and/or take an interdisciplinary, outside-of-the-box approach where other funding opportunities are lacking.
As knowledge entrepreneurs, our grantees have a clear vision of the impact their research could have, and how they can foster the necessary change. We support researchers who aim to actively transfer their newly gained knowledge, and put it on the path to make a real impact. This ultimate objective determines which audiences need to be targeted, and which format the output should have. This makes it possible for the new knowledge to transcend the borders of a single discipline, and go beyond the academic community.
3 key elements
- Ideas, topics, or challenges that are unconventional or have been neglected by the system are a great starting point.
- Interdisciplinary approaches that take into account the broader context of the question at hand, and are therefore sustainable.
- Transfer of new knowledge to the right audience in order to foster change and impact.
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”
External projects and foundation projects
At Velux Stiftung, the core of our activities is grant making for external research projects in the four funding areas – Daylight Research, Healthy Ageing, Ophthalmology and Forestry. While such grants typically support projects of one to four years with expenses of approximately CHF 100,000 per project year, we also have a handful of projects in our portfolio which go beyond this framework because the purpose and impact justify the means.
Additionally, we sometimes engage in topics that are highly relevant to the foundation’s purpose. So far, these foundation projects have included the organization of interdisciplinary workshops to foster exchange and collaboration on a variety of topics.
One such series of interdisciplinary workshops on Daylight Research developed into its own platform – the Daylight Academy. Together with our Danish sister foundations we established the Daylight Award, a prize to raise awareness of the importance of daylight.
In the realm of healthy ageing, we supported the World Health Organization (WHO) to define research standards in healthy ageing which were a key piece for the baseline report. The baseline report was launched 17 December 2020 and marked the start of the Decade for Healthy Ageing. Additionally, we brought together a group of top-notch scientists to think about the role of motivation for healthy ageing. Their multifaceted discussion has been published in 2021 as a collection of articles on motivation and healthy ageing.
These projects are possible because, as a private foundation, our only goal is to make an impact in the areas we engage. We are independent from economic, political, religious, and other interests, and we can act with a long-term perspective. We therefore see ourselves as complementary to governmental funding agencies and traditional grant-makers.
