Research and Innovation to Strengthen the Sustainability of Municipal Health and Care Services

Municipalities/county authorities and approved Norwegian research organisations are eligible to apply. See the list of approved research organisations. 

Requirements relating to the Project Owner 

Applications where a municipality/county municipality is listed as the Project Owner must be approved by the senior administrative management. 

Applications for which a research organisation is listed as the Project Owner must be approved by the administrative management. 

The Project Owner submits the application on behalf of all partners. The partners must approve the application before submission. 

One and the same actor cannot have several roles in the project, for example as both a partner and a subcontractor. 

Requirements relating to the project manager 

The project manager's professional competence and suitability to carry out the project will be assessed by peers. There are no formal requirements for the project manager's qualifications. 

The project manager must be employed by the Project Owner or one of the partners. 

You can be the project manager for a maximum of one application under this call. 

Requirements relating to partners 

Municipalities/county authorities and/or approved Norwegian research organisations are required to participate as partners, and the project must be carried out in effective collaboration between several municipalities/county authorities and at least one approved Norwegian research organisation. 

Foreign organisations can participate as partners in the project and receive funding. 

If the Project Owner submitting the application is a municipality/county authority, collaboration with at least one approved Norwegian research organisation and at least one other municipality/county authority is required.  

If the Project Owner is an approved Norwegian research organisation, collaboration with at least two municipalities/county authorities (registered with an organisation number in Norway) is required, and the project must have a steering group or reference group in which the partners are represented.  

The application must be strategically supported by all partners. This must be confirmed in the letters of intent, and the letters of intent must provide a description of what each partner will contribute to the project. All partners must have a part of the project's budget. 

In the application, you must describe how the expertise and results built up in the project can benefit larger user groups. 

Requirement for effective collaboration 

The project must be carried out in effective collaboration between several municipalities/county authorities and at least one approved Norwegian research organisation. It is a requirement that a minimum of 30 per cent of the project's total costs are spent by municipalities and that a minimum of 30 per cent is spent by research organisations. 

The requirement for effective collaboration means that all partners must actively contribute to the work on the project, and risks and results must be shared. Everyone must also contribute to disseminating results and ensuring that new knowledge and innovation are put to use. 

Effective collaboration is defined as follows in the state aid rules: 

Collaboration between at least two independent parties to exchange knowledge or technology, or to achieve a common objective based on the division of labour, where the parties jointly define the scope of the collaborative project, contribute to its implementation and share its risks, as well as its results. One or more parties may bear all the costs of the project, thereby relieving other parties of financial risk. Contract research and provision of research services are not considered forms of collaboration.  

Note that the Project Owner and partners must be independent of each other, which means that one cannot have a controlling influence over the other. This follows from the definition of partner in our General Terms and Conditions for R&D Projects, in conjunction with the definition of effective collaboration. The same applies to the partners themselves.  

Expectations of other cooperation  

To ensure the sharing and dissemination of results, we encourage more actors to participate as partners in the project. The industry sector, non-governmental organisations and other actors relevant to the project should participate as partners in the project and may receive funding. Other actors include e.g. GPs, the specialist health service, government organisations, service providers and foreign research organisations. 

Requirements for user participation 

It is a requirement that the project has user participation involving end users. End users can be partners or partners in the projects, and they must be involved in the planning and implementation of the project and in the exploitation of the results. End users can e.g. be those who will receive the service or their relatives, professional users/user organisations and/or those who will deliver the service (employees).  Their role must be described in the project description and, if applicable, letters of intent. 

Subcontractors 

Subcontractors are not project partners and should not be listed in the application form or in agreement documents. Subcontractors cannot be given rights to project results. In principle, the Project Owner and the partners are free to engage and, if necessary, change subcontractors within the framework of the contract. Organisations that are subject to the regulations for public procurement must in the usual way carry out the selection of subcontractors in line with these regulations. 

You can apply for funding to cover the actual costs necessary to carry out the project. The Project Owner must obtain information on costs from the partners in the project. These costs must be entered in the cost plan under the cost type to which they belong. 

We require that you specify the following types of costs in the application: 

• Payroll and indirect expenses, which are costs incurred by the Project Owner and partners in the project. Funding for PhD and postdoctoral fellowships can be applied for. PhD candidates can be employed in both municipalities and R&D organisations.      
• Other operating expenses, which are costs for other activities that are necessary to carry out the project's R&D activities. Any purchases from subcontractors must be entered here. All costs entered as "other operating expenses" must be specified in the application.  
• Equipment, which includes operating and depreciation costs for scientific equipment necessary to carry out the project.  

The item procurement of R&D services must not be used.  

If doctoral and postdoctoral research fellows are included in the project and there are specific plans for them to stay abroad, this may be included in the application. The Research Council also has a separate call for proposals for research stays abroad for doctoral and post-doctoral research fellows. Here, the project manager can apply for funding for research stays abroad for research fellows who are part of the project during the project period. 

If the research fellow is to be employed by a municipality, a maximum of 50 per cent of the costs of the research fellowship position may be included in the participation requirement for the municipality (discussed under Requirements for effective collaboration). 

Costs for GPs can be included in the municipal share of at least 30 %, but there should be a good balance between costs for GPs and other contributions on the municipal side. GPs who have sole proprietorships can be subcontractors. 

You can find detailed and important information about what to enter in the project budget on our website.   

Scope of support 

Funding of NOK 6 - 16 million per project is available under this call.  We do not require own financing from actors other than those covered by the state aid rules. 

Conditions for funding 

Funding to organisations engaged in non-economic activity does not constitute state aid. For organisations that engage in both economic and non-economic activity, the Research Council assumes that the necessary accounting separation is in place. 

Funding to "undertakings" constitutes state aid. In this context, an undertaking means any actor that engages in economic activity by offering goods and/or services in a market. Aid to undertakings is granted on the basis of Article 25 of the General Block Exemption Regulation (Commission Regulation (EU) No 651/2014). Read more about state aid.

For enterprises that are enterprises within the meaning of state aid law, the degree of support for the enterprise's project costs will depend on the size and type of R&D activities of the enterprise. The aid intensity may thus vary from 25 to 80 per cent; Article 25: Support for research and development projects. In the application form's progress plan, you must categorise the R&D activities by selecting industrial research and/or experimental development from the drop-down menu.    

We do not provide support for activities of an operational nature and measures to exploit the R&D results, such as the protection of intangible activities. 

Aid may not be granted to undertakings that have not complied with the requirements for repayment following a previous decision by the ESA/EU Commission declaring the aid illegal and incompatible with the internal market. Nor may aid be granted to undertakings in difficulty within the meaning of EEA law. 

The scheme shall be practised in accordance with the EEA Agreement's state aid rules. Terms and concepts shall be interpreted in accordance with the corresponding terms and concepts in the aid rules. In the event of any conflict between the announcement and the state aid rules, the latter shall take precedence. For the same reason, the call for proposals may also be adjusted. 

If you receive state aid from us that is equivalent to EUR 100,000 or more, we will make it known in the Register of State Aid. 

The companies participating in the project must submit a self-declaration confirming that they are eligible to receive state aid. 

The call for proposals has been notified as an aid scheme to the EFTA Surveillance Authority (ESA), and has the reference: GBER XX/2025/R&D&I – update to come. 

Ethics 

The Research Council requires a high standard of research ethics in the projects we fund, and ethics is included in our assessment criteria. In the template for the project description, there is a separate section that deals with this. The description of ethics is first and foremost an assurance to the peers that there is a plan in place to deal with the most important ethical dilemmas in the project. If you need to describe this in more detail, this can be done elsewhere in the project description, for example under method selection, or you can do so in the data management plan(s) (see below). 

The responsibility for ensuring that the research ethics standard is followed lies with the individual researcher and research institution (cf. the Act on the Organisation of Research Ethics Work). The panel's assessment and the Research Council's decision on the award do not entail any approval of research ethics. 

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

• The Research Council's conditions for allocations can be found in our general terms and conditions for R&D projects on the information page What the contract involves.  
• The Project Owner must establish a consortium agreement with all partners in the project. This Agreement shall govern mutual rights and obligations. It must also ensure that no collaborating undertaking receives indirect support from the Project Owner or partners. This means that it must contain conditions that ensure compliance with Section 29 of ESA's guidelines on state aid for R&D&I.  
• If the project has PhD and postdoctoral research fellows where the responsible higher education institution does not participate in the application, you must also have a collaboration agreement with the responsible/degree-conferring institution. 
• The project manager and the Project Owner must have assessed and handled the consideration of research security in the project. Research security refers to risks associated with unwanted transfer of knowledge and technology, impact on research and innovation, or breaches of research ethics/integrity where knowledge and technology are used to undermine key societal values.  
• Grant recipients in research organisations and the public sector (Project Owners and partners) must have action plans for gender equality (GEPs) available on their websites. The requirement does not apply to the private sector, interest groups or the voluntary sector.  
• 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 application, where you will find more information about the requirements for data management plans in projects that receive funding from us.  
• For medical and health studies involving humans, the Research Council sets special requirements and guidelines for prospective registration of studies and publication of results.   
• There is a requirement for an annual project accounting report documenting accrued project costs and their financing. The Research Council's prerequisites for allocating and disbursing funding are set out in the General Terms and Conditions for R&D Projects. 

You can change and submit the application several times until the application deadline. We recommend that you submit your application as soon as you have completed the application form and uploaded the required attachments. When the application deadline expires, it is the version of the application that was submitted most recently that we process. 

• The application must meet the topic, guidelines and formal requirements set out in the call. 
• Requirements relating to the Project Owner, organisation and project manager must be met. 
• Requirements for partners must be met. 
• Requirements for effective cooperation must be met. 
• The application and all attachments must be written in Norwegian or English. 
• All attachments must be in PDF format. 

Mandatory attachments 

• Project description. Use the template at the bottom of the page. 
• Description of relevance of a maximum of one page. Uploaded as attachment type "Other". 
• CV for project manager and collaborators. Use the template at the bottom of the page. 
• Letters of intent from all the partners. Use the template at the bottom of the page. 
• Partner information (for companies/companies only). Use the template at the bottom of the page. Please note that in applications where companies/companies are not included as partners, you must upload an empty template to this field (p. 6 Appendix Partner information* in the application form). 

Applications that do not meet the requirements above will be rejected. 

Optional attachments 

• CVs of other key participants in the project. 
• Proposals for up to three non-Norwegian peers who are presumed to be impartial to assess the application. 

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

We will not consider documents and websites linked to in the application, or attachments other than those specified above. Be careful to upload the correct attachment type, as there are no technical restrictions on what kind of templates it is possible to upload in the application form. 

Applications will be assessed in light of the purpose of the call and the following criteria: 

Once we have received the applications, we will first carry out a preliminary assessment to check whether the applications meet the topic, guidelines and formal requirements set out in the call. Applications that do not satisfy the topic, guidelines and formal requirements of the call will be rejected. 

After the preliminary assessment, applications that meet the formal requirements will be allocated to panels consisting of peers/referees with relevant expertise. 

For each application, we check that the referees/referees are impartial and have sufficient expertise in the application's thematic area. The panel assesses the criteria "Excellence", "Impact" and "Implementation". A consensus mark is given for each of these criteria. 

The panel's assessment is of crucial importance for whether the project can be awarded funding. 

After the panel has assessed the applications, applications that exceed a certain threshold value will be assessed for the criterion "Relevance to the call" by Research Council case officers. A reference group consisting of people with experience from the municipal health and care services and users/end-users will provide input to the work on the relevance assessment. The result of the assessment of the four above-mentioned criteria is summarised in an "overall mark" as an overall expression of the quality of the application. 

The administration submits the relevance assessed applications and marks for decision by the Research Council's portfolio board for health. The portfolio board will place emphasis on achieving a balanced portfolio of projects. These decision regarding funding will be based on the budget framework, the text of the call for proposals and the letter of allocation. 

We expect to publish which applications will receive funding in January 2026.