Commissioning research projects

To commission the studies serving the Government's decision-making, open calls for proposals are held based on the Government's annual research plan.

The calls for proposals are open to higher education institutions, research institutes and other organisations engaged in research and development, or consortia formed by these. Contracts for commissioning the studies are concluded with background organisations, not individuals.

The Prime Minister's Office appoints a group of ministry specialists, which reviews the proposals, makes their selection and presents it to the Prime Minister’s Office. The selection criteria are relevance and applicability (25%), project novelty and quality (30%), project implementers’ expertise and sufficiency of resources (30%), communications and information management (5%), and the plan for using the project appropriation (10%). The description of the information need, provided in the call for proposals, serves as the basis for comparison. The review of proposals includes numerical assessment, and a verbal assessment comparing the proposals and supporting the numerical assessment.

The Prime Minister’s Office makes the decision to commission a research project and draws up a contract with the project implementer. The appropriation covers all project costs, so no own contribution is required.

The Prime Minister’s Office appoints a person or monitoring group tasked with supporting, monitoring and supervising project implementation. After the appointed person or the monitoring group has given their preliminary approval, the Prime Minister’s Office decides on the payment of project invoices and the publication of the final report. The Prime Minister's Office is tasked with managing the research projects in accordance with the contracts.

All calls for proposals for the research supporting the Government's decision-making are published online in the Government's service system at vntutkiva.fiLink to an external website, Opens in a new tab. The VN Tutkiva online system is available in Finnish. The proposal forms can be completed in Finnish or Swedish. The project plan and CVs attached to the proposal can be in Finnish, Swedish or English.