Competence clusters
In line with the objectives of its strategy, the Research Council of Finland supports the strengthening of competence clusters through, for example, funding for Centres of Excellence, Finnish Flagships, research infrastructures and partnership networks.
Centres of Excellence in Research (CoEs) are competence clusters that have an impact on society and are at the international cutting edge in their field of science. CoEs carry out innovative research, develop creative research environments and train new talented researchers for Finnish research and business.
The Research Council of Finland had all Centres of Excellence of the 2014–2019 Centre of Excellence Programme conduct a self-assessment of their impact in their final reports. With the impact assessments, the Research Council wanted to hear the CoEs describe the different forms and objectives of their impact and whether they had reached these objectives. Read a summary of the self-assessment of the impact of the Centre of Excellence Programme 2014–2019.
Find out more about the Centres of Excellence 2018–2025 on the Research Council of Finland’s YouTube channel: Playlist: Finnish Centres of Excellence in Research
Read more about the Centre of Excellence Programmes.
The Research Council of Finland’s Flagship Programme is an instrument that supports high-quality research and increases the economic and societal impact emerging from the research. The Flagships are competence clusters that carry out cutting-edge research in their respective fields. The Flagship Programme strengthens cooperation between research institutions, companies and other actors in society.
Flagships create future expertise and sustainable solutions to societal challenges. The results of the first six Flagships have shown to have had many kinds of impact during their first years of operation:
Research Council funding provides great leverage:
- double the amount of business funding compared to Research Council funding
- five times the amount of EU funding compared to Research Council Flagship funding
Learn more about the Finnish Flagships on the Research Council of Finland’s YouTube channel: Playlist: Finnish Research Flagships
Read more about the impact of Flagships.
Read more about the Flagship Programme.
Research infrastructures are instruments, equipment, information networks, databases, materials and services that serve to facilitate research, promote research collaboration and reinforce research and innovation capacity and know-how.
Research infrastructure services also play an important role in society: they promote digitalisation and the achievement of sustainable development goals, the strengthening of economic renewal and the development of education.
The Finnish research infrastructure landscape includes international, national, local and regional infrastructures.
Research infrastructure projects that submitted their final report between 2019 and 2022 achieved, at least:
- 350 new technologies
- 70 patents
- 110 invention notifications
- 120 speech and text databases
- 200 FTEs
- 4,700 scientific publications
- 2,500 other publications.
There was also extensive cooperation, at least:
- 300,000 users
- 500 business users
- 3 million data downloads
- 2,300 partners, of which
- 50 % new partners
- 70 % international partners
- 15 % companies or private parties.
The research infrastructure projects that were reported on between 2019 and 2022 received a total of 56 million euros in funding.
Source: Academy of Finland, FIRI final reports 2019–2022 (n = 47)
Read more about the impact of research infrastructures from the Roadmap for Finnish Research Infrastructures 2021–2024.
Read more about the Strategy for National Research Infrastructures in Finland 2020–2030
Read more about research infrastructures.
