With the 1000 Ideas Programme, the FWF supports the promotion of completely new, daring or particularly original research ideas that lie outside the current scientific understanding. The key aim is to investigate future-oriented research topics with high scientific and transformative potential.

Target group

• Qualified principal investigators—both established researchers and those at the beginning of their career(usually with a PhD/MD)—who work or want to work at Austrian research institutions.
• Formal applications are submitted by the Austrian research institution; there is no limit to the number of applications that can be submitted by a research institution.
• A principal investigator can only be involved in one project application. The FWF’s limit on the number of funded projects in other programmes does not apply to applications for the 1000 Ideas Programme.

Objectives

• Foster creativity, encourage risk-taking and facilitate the development of novel, innovative research domains;
• Focus on high-risk, original or transformative research at an early stage, which may be too premature to have very good chances of obtaining funding via existing grant programmes due to the unconventional design, lack of validating data and/or the high risks involved;
• Address visionary research ideas that cross disciplinary boundaries and/or are not yet the subject of debates in academic research and/or in society.

Requirements

• International scientific or scholarly publications
• During the course of the project, the principal investigator must be employed at least 50% at a research institution; this must be confirmed by the research institution.
• Usually a completed PhD/MD at the time of submission
• Anonymous submission, i.e. the identity, the career level of all researchers and cooperation partners (Austrian and international) or the names of any research institutions (Austrian and international) must not be recognizable from the research proposal
• The research proposal must contain
• i) Summary max. 1 page, which is understandable for a scientific, disciplinary diverse audience
• ii) a project description, max. 3 pages, primarily addressing the project’s transformative potential and its scientific and scholarly foundation
• iii) a description addressing the planned realisation of the proposed research including a logical and step-by-step plan (max. 2 pages) and
• iv) a risk assessment
• v) list of works cited (max. 15 references).
• The proposals received will be checked very rigorously with regard to form and anonymity, and proposals that do not meet the requirements will be excluded.

Length

• Minimum of 6, maximum of 24 months

Level

Minimum of €50,000 and maximum of €150,000. These costs will be covered: Personnel costs for the own position (up to max. 50 %) as well as employees, material, equipment, travel, other costs and 5 % general project costs. The funding of doctoral positions is not possible.

Allocation

• Double-blind selection procedure
• Decisions are taken by the FWF Board based on the recommendations of the 1000 Ideas Programme jury, in June