Pilot-T: New Mobility Solutions

Only companies that conduct business activities in Norway and have been issued an enterprise number under the Norwegian Register of Business Enterprises are eligible to apply. Public enterprises that carry out activities of an industrial or business nature and that are registered in the Register of Business Enterprises may also serve as the formal applicant.

Groups of companies (e.g. industry organisations), sole proprietorships, research organisations and other organisations are not eligible to apply for funding.

Requirements relating to the Project Owner

The Project Owner must be a company or public enterprise that carries out activities of an industrial or business nature and has been issued an enterprise number under the Norwegian Register of Business Enterprises.

The Project Owner must secure funding for the project (over and above the Research Council’s funding) and make provisions for utilisation of the project results.

Requirements relating to R&D providers

The Project Owner must procure services from at least one Norwegian R&D provider that is an approved research organisation.

R&D providers may not contribute to project funding and in general have no rights to the project results. They deliver on assignment and should receive the market price for their work. If they are nonetheless to maintain the rights to results, this should be reflected in the assignment’s pricing. The scope of the R&D provider’s role in the project is based on the Project Owner’s and partners’ needs. Therefore, no requirement applies to the scope of work. The R&D provider’s role in the project must be clearly described in the grant application.

Collaboration with companies and public sector entities

• The applicant can carry out the project in cooperation with other companies if these companies either cover their own costs or make use of Pilot-T project funding. Partners must fulfil the criteria listed under the section ‘Who is eligible to apply?’ to be able to receive funding. Partners must be involved in what is known as an effective collaboration with the Project Owner, which entails sharing both the risk associated with the project and the results it generates. Partners whose project costs are covered in part by Research Council funding are recipients of state aid. We do not require Project Owners to cooperate with other companies, but such collaboration may trigger extra state aid if the requirements in the state aid rules are met.
• Public sector entities may participate in the project, but will not receive Research Council funding. Public sector partners must also be included in the effective collaboration with the Project Owner and with any other partners.
• Research services for the project may also be procured from international research groups or Norwegian expert environments that are not approved R&D organisations, but this in itself does not fulfil the requirements relating to R&D providers. Other international partners may be involved in the project provided that their participation promotes value creation in Norway, but their costs will not be eligible for Pilot-T support and the international partner must cover all of its own costs.

The application with relevant partners and R&D providers at the time the application is submitted forms the basis for grant allocation, and is a stringent condition for funding. Changes made to the composition of a project before a contract has been entered into may result in the Research Council withdrawing its offer of funding.

Roles in the project

The Project Owner or one of the partners may not be in an interdependent relationship with any of the R&D providers in the project, e.g. where both entities are part of the same corporation. The ‘arm’s length principle’ must be observed when engaging R&D providers.

Support for Pilot-T projects is awarded in accordance with the EEA state aid rules, more specifically Article 25 of the General Block Exemption Regulation for state aid. Among other things, this means that:

• Support is only available for project costs relating to R&D activities. Activities that are eligible for support include, but are not limited to, applied research, prototyping, demonstration and pilot testing.
• Costs for other types of activities and measures to exploit R&D results, such as filing for patents, market surveys and marketing, testing and completion of new products and services are not approved for funding.
• The level of support (aid intensity) is subject to limitations and will depend on the project’s R&D content. Activities classified as ‘industrial research’ are eligible for a higher aid intensity than “experimental development” activities.
• Other public funding of the costs eligible for funding will affect the amount of Pilot-T funding that can be provided.
• Notification of all allocated state aid will be published on the Research Council’s website, and allocated state aid of EUR 500,000 or more will be listed in a public registry.

We can provide funding for parts of the business partners’ costs pertaining to R&D activities under the project. Funding can be provided for both direct and indirect project costs to the extent they can be categorised as costs pertaining to industrial research or experimental development. This applies to costs associated with R&D activities carried out by the project partners, and to costs incurred in connection with purchase of R&D services from R&D providers.

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

Scope of funding

The amount of funding that may be sought is limited to a minimum of NOK 2 million and a maximum of NOK 16 million for a project period between one and three years.

The scope of funding for the enterprise’s project costs depends on the size of the company and the type of R&D activities to be carried out:

The aid intensity for industrial research and experimental development can be increased by 15 percentage points up to a maximum aid intensity of 80 per cent as follows: if the project entails effective collaboration between enterprises where at least one is an SME and no single enterprise incurs more than 70 per cent of the costs eligible for funding. We do not provide other types of additional funding. The aid intensity may therefore vary from 25 per cent to 80 per cent, cf. the state aid rules (see ‘Article 25: Aid for research and development projects’ in the link), and the table above. 

Conditions for funding

The project must start between 1 January 2022 and 1 June 2022. The latest permitted completion date for the project is 31 May 2025.

Funding awarded to an ‘undertaking’ constitutes state aid. In this context, an ‘undertaking’ is defined as any actor that carries out an economic activity consisting of offering products and/or services on a given market. When an undertaking receives support to cover a portion of its project costs as a Project Owner or partner in the project, this support must be awarded in accordance with Article 25 of the General Block Exemption Regulation for state aid (Commission Regulation (EU) No 651/2014).

The call for proposals has been approved as an aid scheme by the EFTA Surveillance Authority (ESA) with the reference: GBER 90/2021/RDI.

The Research Council requires full and immediate open access to scientific articles; see Plan S – open access to publications.

Research data must be made available in accordance with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). The Project Owner organisation of projects that process data must prepare a data management plan in connection with the revised application.

The Project Owner organisation is responsible for selecting which archiving solution(s) to use for storing research data generated during the project.

The Research Council of Norway

The Research Council provides support for projects where new knowledge and testing/piloting are needed to implement new technology and new business models, also if the final solution and/or product has a long time-to-market. Pilot-T projects funded by the Research Council must include procurement of research and development services from an approved R&D organisation.

Innovation Norway

Innovation Norway provides support for market-based innovation projects that generate value creation in Norway This may involve new use of existing knowledge as well as projects that comprise development, demonstration and/or testing solutions on the market. The innovation must have a high level of novelty. Innovation Norway’s call: Pilot-T: New Mobility Solutions (innovasjonnorge.no) is available here.

Please note that the Research Council of Norway and Innovation Norway will process the applications they receive, respectively, but that applications may be made available to case officers in both organisations when this is appropriate and in consultation with the applicant. If a company submits an application in response to both calls, the applications will be checked to determine whether they are identical.

You may revise and resubmit your grant application form multiple times up to the application submission deadline. We recommend that you submit your application as soon as you have filled in the application form and included all mandatory attachments. After the deadline, it is the most recently submitted version of the grant application that will be processed.

• The application and all attachments must be written in Norwegian or English.
• All attachments must be uploaded in PDF format.
• The earliest permitted start date for the project is 1 January 2022.
• The latest permitted completion date for the project is 1 June 2022.
• At least one R&D provider that is on the list of approved R&D organisations must be included the grant application form.
• Any other partners or R&D providers must also be registered in the grant application form.

Mandatory attachments

• Project description of up to 10 pages in length using the template available for download at the end of the call.
• Information about partners for the applicant company and each of the participating companies, using the template available for download at the end of the call.
• The CV of the project manager using the template available for download at the end of the call.
• The CVs of key project participants who will perform important R&D activities for the project using the template available for download at the end of the call.

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

Optional attachment

• Proposals for up to three referees who are considered qualified to assess the application

We will not assess documents and websites linked to in the application, or other attachments than those specified above. There is no technical validation of the content of the attachments you upload, so please make sure that you upload the correct file for the selected type of attachment.

Grant applications will be assessed on the basis of the following criteria:

The Research Council will prioritise projects that

• have a high degree of innovation
• have a female project manager (when the applications are otherwise considered to be on a par)

The application and mandatory attachments will be made available in a digital portal for referees who will perform an assessment of the criteria ‘Excellence’, Impact’ and ‘Implementation’. The referees will convene in a panel meeting to reach a consensus-based assessment of the grant application for each of these three criteria.

If the mark awarded by the referee panel for all of the criteria is 4 or higher on a scale where 7 is the highest mark, the application will be assessed by the Research Council’s case officers also on the basis of the criterion ‘Relevance to the call for proposals’. The assessment of the relevance criterion will attach importance to the project’s contribution to the creation of an efficient, safe and environmentally-friendly transport system for the future, through the accelerated application of effective solutions.

The assessment and marks for all four criteria will be consolidated into a single, overall mark that indicates the merit of the application.

We will draw up a recommendation on which applications to fund based on an overall assessment of the project portfolio, which will then form the basis for the portfolio board's funding decisions. The Portfolio board will emphasise achieving a balanced portfolio of projects within their area of responsibility, including in relation to ongoing projects.

See also: Processing applications.

We expect to publish which applications have been awarded funding in week 49. For updated dates and a list of the applications granted funding, see application results here.

When a project is recommended for funding, we will require more information about the project and the project partners.