Funder: Volkswagen Foundation
Due Dates (Anticipated): August 2027 (Short proposals)
Funding Amounts: Up to €1.3 million for 3–5 years
Summary: Supports radically exploratory, high-risk basic research across all disciplines with potential for major breakthroughs or paradigm shifts.
Key Information: The lead PI must have a German host institution, and applicants must participate in anonymous peer review.
Description
The Volkswagen Foundation’s Pioneering Research programme supports unconventional basic research that ventures into previously unexplored scientific territory. Open to all disciplines, it funds visionary projects that ask unorthodox questions, pursue new scientific challenges, and offer substantial potential for knowledge gain without a defined commercialisation or application context. Projects should move beyond the “known unknown” rather than extend established research paths.
The programme seeks scientifically sound, coherent ideas with high conceptual or methodological risks, including a genuine possibility of failure. Successful projects should close major knowledge gaps and provide fundamentally new impetus within their specialist community or beyond, potentially enabling breakthroughs or paradigm shifts. The focus is on new scientific questions with as little preliminary work as possible, not incremental advances, conventional follow-on research, or primarily translational work.
