SBO Strategic Basic Research Projects
Funds strategic basic research across Flemish institutions in AI, biotech, climate, and engineering.
The FWO Strategic Basic Research (SBO) programme funds four-year projects at Flemish research institutions where scientific success is expected to create concrete prospects for economic or societal applications. The 2026 call opened on 26 May 2026 with a pre-registration deadline of 11 September 2026 and a final submission deadline of 25 September 2026 at 17:00. Results for the 2026–2027 call will be announced at the end of May 2027. The total available budget for this call is €45.5 million including overhead. Each participating legal entity with a budget share of at least 15% of the project total may receive up to €425,000 per year excluding overhead (€500,000 including the 17% overhead supplement), with a guideline project budget of approximately €1.7 million excluding overhead. The 2025 call success rate was 19%.
Only Flemish research institutions are eligible as lead applicants: universities, university colleges, strategic research centres such as imec, VITO, VIB, and Flanders Make, and other publicly funded scientific institutions. Non-Flemish partners may receive up to 20% of the total project budget. Each researcher may serve as supervisor-spokesperson or co-supervisor for at most one SBO project per call, and the combined total of submitted and ongoing SBO projects per researcher must not exceed two. Intellectual property vests with the project partners; any transfer to commercial actors must occur under market-conform conditions.
Projects must establish a mandatory advisory committee comprising potential economic or societal users, reinforcing the application-oriented character of the programme. The rebuttal window runs 6–14 January 2027, giving applicants an opportunity to respond to reviewer comments before final decisions. Teams assembling proposals should plan for a rigorous two-stage interaction with the review panel and budget for the overhead supplement when calculating maximum eligible costs.
Strategic basic research with prospects for economic or societal applications — bottom-up across all disciplines.
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