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FLAG-ERA Joint Transnational Call for Flagship Proof-of-Concept Projects

The SNSF participates in a call supporting Flagship proof-of-concept projects on ICT for Social Sciences, High-Efficiency Sensor Networks and Cooperative Robots.

In the process of selecting the first two Flagships, namely the Graphene Flagship and the Human Brain Project, four other candidates were pre-selected out of 21 proposals and led to Flagship preparatory actions, also known as “Pilots”: FuturICT, Guardian Angels, IT Future of Medicine, and Robot Companions. Though these four Pilots were eventually not selected in the second phase, they have identified topics where the Flagship model could bring much added value and have generated considerable interest in many European countries.

FLAG-ERA stands for the ‘Flagship ERA-NET’ and is a network of national and regional funding organisations from Europe and beyond. The new FLAG-ERA Joint Transnational Call (JTC) 2016 will support projects in the fields of the Flagship Pilots, with the aim of building on the visions they have identified. The call will cover four topics, each corresponding to the domain of aFlagship-PilotsExternal Link Icon, and the Swiss National Science Foundation will participate in three of them:

  • ICT for Social Sciences (ICTSS)
  • High-Efficiency Sensor Networks (HESN)
  • Cooperative Robots (CR)

The total call budget is approximatively 14 M€.

Proposals are submitted by international consortia with partners from multiple countries and the proposal evaluation and selection are international, but grant agreements for the selected projects are established directly between the consortium partners and their respective funding organisations. Each partner should be eligible for the funding organisation to which it requests funding.

The present JTC aims at supporting transnational Flagship proof-of-concept research projects in the scope of the four call topics with the following main goals:

  • Showcase federative activities with the potential to develop a long-lasting coordination of a large cluster of European and international research centres sharing the proposed unifying vision;
  • Complement existing initiatives and have a transformative character with a high potential impact, in particular through changes of organisation and practices in research and innovation activities;
  • Organise networking activities and deliver plans and recommendations to further develop research and innovation in the domain beyond the proposed project.

Since the objective is to foster large scale cooperation at the European level, contrarily to more traditional ERA-NET calls, the goal is to support onlyone inclusive project per topic. While stemming from the Flagship preparatory actions, this new call is open to research teams independently of whether they were members of the Pilot consortia or not.The SNSF will allocate a total of 3 mioCHF, i.e. up to 1 mioCHF for each of the three topics in which it participates.

The submission deadline on the FLAG-ERA website is March 31, 2016, 17:00 CET.Swiss applicants must provide basic administrative data by submitting a parallel application via the online mySNF tool for the same deadline. Important additional information on the SNSF requirements are provided on page 24 of the Call Announcement.

Links to relevant documents