Purpose

Many scientific challenges that have large implications for health and sustainability can only be addressed through interdisciplinary efforts. With the Interdisciplinary Synergy Programme, NNF seeks to strengthen the synergy between researchers, across disciplines, organisations, and national borders. The goals of the Interdisciplinary Synergy Programme are to:

• Enable creative, novel, high-risk/high-gain interdisciplinary research
• Provide long-term support of interdisciplinary collaborations and research ideas
• Stimulate emerging research that spans across scientific disciplines and techniques
• Break down or overcome the barriers that hamper collaboration across disciplines
• Strengthen Danish research through internationalisation

The Interdisciplinary Synergy Programme is designed to fund the exploration of novel research areas that demonstrate the potential to have a high level of impact, i.e. high risk/high-gain. Specifically, this programme aims to support fundamental research between technology readiness levels (TRL) 1 and 2, as defined by the European Commission. Opportunities for projects that have experimentally demonstrated proof of concept (TRL 3+) are available in other NNF grant calls.

The project is ideally founded on clear pilot data that support pursuing the novel and high-risk/high-gain idea over an extended project period of 4 years. If there at the application stage exists no pilot data, the applicants are encouraged to consider the Exploratory Interdisciplinary Synergy Programme.