Abstract

The Centres of Excellence (CoEs) Programme is a long-standing and highly prestigious funding instrument of the biggest Finnish national funder, the Academy of Finland. The Programme’s goals are strongly rooted in science policy with the intention to advance the competitiveness of Finnish science through the advancement of attractive research environments. The CoE Programmes start at regular intervals providing long-term funding for those selected as CoEs. The CoEs in a Programme are chosen based on a highly competitive call open for all scientific fields. The success rates in the most recent calls have been well below 10 percent.

The most important selection criterion in the CoE Programmes is the scientific excellence. Recently, the Academy of Finland has developed the selection criteria to embrace also other two criteria coinciding with the strategic goals of the Academy, namely renewal and impact. Simultaneously, the Academy has also extended the funding period of the CoEs from six to eight years and opened up the Programmes to younger generation of applicants not yet at the international top of their field but having the qualifications to reach the top.

Because of the developments concerning the selection criteria, funding period as well as the group of applicants for which the Programmes are open, the calls for the CoE Programmes have required the University of Helsinki (UH) to develop its practices and policies in a context that combines both bottom-up and top-down elements. The consortia applying for a CoE are formed bottom-up and are often comprised of researchers and research groups from several different organizations. At the same time, the organizations hosting CoEs are expected to support the CoEs, e.g. by contributing to the CoE’s funding.

For UH, which is the largest and most multidisciplinary Finnish university, this has meant that the practices and policies for the CoE Programmes need to be formed with multiple stakeholders in mind. These include e.g.:
- a widened group of individual researchers and research groups forming the consortia both at UH and other organizations,
- large array of academic units and their heads at UH hosting the CoEs,
- university leadership at UH ultimately determining the umbrella of guidelines and recommendations to guide the academic units’ financial contribution towards CoEs,
- university services where different service branches need to collaborate within the university and, to some extent, between organizations.

The presentation will provide practical-level information and lessons learned from the formulation of the UH guidelines as well as organizing support services in a recent call for the CoE Programme. The experiences demonstrate that the longer call intervals resulting from the longer funding period together with the opening-up of the Programme for a wider array of applicants have for example effects on the applicants’, unit heads' as well as the support services’ familiarity with the Programme and calls. This, in turn, has implications for issues like the need of capacity building before calls, organization of support services during the call and preservation and accumulation of know-how related to the CoE Programmes in-between the calls.