Towards a better future – propose themes for strategic research programmes in 2024

The Strategic Research Council (SRC) established within the Academy of Finland will open an online survey on 11 October to collect theme proposals for strategic research programmes to be launched in 2024. Strategic research refers to long-term and scientifically high-level research aimed at finding solutions to major challenges facing Finnish society.

The survey is open from 11 October to 3 November 2022.

What makes a good theme?

The goal of the survey is to identify themes that

•  are key challenges for the future of Finland
• require multidisciplinary research to generate new knowledge
• are horizontal and extensively affect different sectors of society
• are sufficiently distinct in relation to previous themes.

The aim is also to develop new, forward-looking combinations of know-how and research as well as long-term approaches that will carry through the whole six-year programme period. The survey does not seek individual research topics but multidisciplinary wholes that meet the above characteristics of a good theme. It is also good to take into account the types of research questions that have already been funded under SRC programmes.

The theme preparation is a foresighting exercise. The aim is to identify long-term information needs and themes in society where new multidisciplinary and impactful research is needed in order to build a better future.

Submit your proposal by 3 November

Proposals on themes for the strategic research programmes to be launched in 2024 can be submitted by 3 November through the Viima survey platform.

Viima enables respondents not only to submit their own proposals but also to comment on and discuss other proposals. Ideally, the discussion will lead to cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary forward-looking proposals that identify future challenges and open-mindedly combine different perspectives and disciplines. Respondents can also add hashtags to the proposals, which makes it possible to examine submitted proposals by theme.

The SRC will make use of the proposals in the theme preparation for future programmes. The collected proposals can also be used in planning the SRC’s and the Academy of Finland’s programmes in the coming years. The survey data will be kept at the Academy for possible reuse. If possible, the data will also be stored at the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD) for research and teaching purposes. All data archived at the FSD will be anonymised. The Academy of Finland and the SRC reserve the right to edit and/or discard proposals.

To participate in the survey, respondents must either create a Viima account or sign in with their LinkedIn or Google accounts, for example.

Go to the theme survey