New NWA call for proposals: Idea Generator for creative and innovative ideas and small projects
The Dutch Research Agenda (NWA) has published a second call for proposals for the Idea Generator. In this round, NWA is making two million euros available with which researchers from the entire knowledge chain can elaborate creative and innovative ideas. The projects have a maximum size of 50,000 euros.
With the low threshold funding instrument Idea Generator, the Dutch Research Agenda wants to provide more opportunities for small-scale, risky research projects. Via the Idea Generator, interested researchers can further develop early research ideas with various parties in society.
The Idea Generator was evaluated after the first round of awards. This evaluation led to various changes. In the second round, NWO will:
- examine whether proposals fit within the NWA programme;
- bundle the NWA routes in five clusters to assess proposals on an interdisciplinary basis but also to allow a better comparative assessment of the proposals;
- allocate the available budget over these five clusters to guarantee a spread;
- adopt changes to improve the gender balance in awards. For example, the language use in the call text is gender neutral, there is an ex-aequo regulation in favour of women, and the assessment is anonymous to prevent unintended bias.
Another new aspect in this round is that applicants will assess each other. NWO considers it important to keep the procedure for the Idea Generator short and efficient so that the project leaders can start sooner. After all, this concerns applications with a limited budget size for which a standard assessment process at NWO would cost a lot of time and manpower.
Deadline
The deadline for submitting proposals is 27 February 2020. There will be no pre-proposal phase or other letters of intent.