“Fonds Zukunft Österreich” Provides Austria’s Top-Level Research with an Important Measure of Planning Certainty

The arrangement and endowment of the Future Austria Fund is an important building block on the path to implementing the Research Strategy 2030. “It’s good for Austria as a centre of research that the Fonds Zukunft Österreich is proceeding at such a rapid pace”, says FWF President Christof Gattringer. “The task now is to invest in especially promising fields and offer researchers attractive conditions to enable Austrian research to make big strides forward”.

Ministers Leonore Gewessler, Martin Polaschek, and Margarete Schramböck recently presented the priorities of the new “Fonds Zukunft Österreich” for 2022 and the respective funding amounts. The FWF will seek funding for programmes in several fields of competition-based fundamental research and, in the process, coordinate its activities with other funding agencies, too. There are numerous overlaps between the FWF’s funding portfolio and the more broadly defined priorities—such as excellent research groups, the financing of Austrian participations in EU partnerships, and the promotion of young researchers—and the specific thematic areas of the new Fund. 

A particularly important feature is the fixed financing of the “Fonds Zukunft Österreich” until 2025. While the endowment of the National Foundation for Research, Technology and Development often fluctuated in the past due to earned interest, the “Fonds Zukunft Österreich” offers more planning and budget security for all funding agencies submitting programmes, such as aws, FFG, Christian Doppler Research Association, and the FWF.