Vinnova Planning Grant for an International Proposal 2026: Up to SEK 500,000 to Write a Competitive Horizon Europe or Other International Bid, Closing 6 October 2026 at 14:00

Vinnova Planning Grant for an International Proposal 2026: Up to SEK 500,000 to Write a Competitive Horizon Europe or Other International Bid, Closing 6 October 2026 at 14:00

Most funding pages describe money for doing research. This one describes money for writing the application that gets you the money for doing research. Vinnova, Sweden’s innovation agency, runs a standing offer that pays Swedish organisations to spend up to twelve months building a consortium, sharpening a project idea, and drafting a proposal for a published international call — typically a Horizon Europe topic, but any call assessed in genuine international competition qualifies.

The economics are unusual and worth stating plainly. A Horizon Europe collaborative proposal costs a coordinating organisation somewhere between several hundred thousand and well over a million SEK in staff time, partner meetings, and specialist input, and the success rate on many topics sits in the single digits to low teens. A great many Swedish SMEs, institutes and departments simply never bid, because the cost of a losing proposal is unrecoverable and the cost of a winning one is front-loaded. The planning grant exists to remove that first barrier. It does not guarantee you win the international call. It makes the attempt affordable.

The 2026 call opened on 10 March 2026 and runs with two assessment cut-offs. The first application period closed on 21 April 2026 at 14:00 with decisions by 26 May 2026. The final application date is 6 October 2026 at 14:00 — after that, the call closes. All funded planning projects must end no later than 31 January 2028.

Key Details

Note that the English version of the Vinnova page is machine-translated from Swedish. Where the two versions differ, the Swedish text governs. If you are working from the English page and a rule reads ambiguously, check the Swedish original or ask the call manager before you build a budget around your reading.

What the Grant Actually Pays For

Vinnova is explicit about the activities it will fund inside a planning project, and the list is broader than “write the text”.

Consortium building. Meetings and discussions with potential international partners — including travel — to strengthen the composition and internal collaboration of the consortium you intend to submit with. For a coordinator, this is often the single largest line item, and it is the one most likely to be the difference between a proposal that reads as a genuine team and one that reads as a list of CVs.

Proposal development and writing. Developing the project idea and producing and submitting the proposal to the published international call. If you hire external expertise — IPR advice, technical specialists — you must describe their competence and prior experience in the field, and that description is assessed. There is a hard limit here: costs for proposal-writing consultancy may not exceed SEK 75,000 in the budget. Vinnova will fund help with the writing; it will not fund outsourcing the whole proposal.

Scientific or technical groundwork. Pilot studies or proof-of-concept work, where you can explain why the evidence is required for a credible proposal, or where the international call specifically asks for it. This is not a research grant in disguise — the justification has to tie back to what the reviewers of the international call will need to see.

Business-case work. IPR analyses, user interviews, an initial business plan. Again, you must justify why these are needed for the proposal to succeed, or point to where the international call requires them.

Eligible cost categories are salary costs (gross salary, employer contributions and other salary-related costs), material costs for instruments and equipment, consulting costs, other direct costs including materials, supplies and travel, and indirect costs. Overhead is capped at 30% of salary costs, though universities, university colleges, research organisations and government agencies may apply higher permitted levels depending on their activities.

Two things are explicitly excluded. Planning projects that do not target a published international call — meaning you cannot use this to explore a vague future ambition — and proposals aimed at Eureka programmes, including Eureka Eurostars.

Who Is Eligible, and Where Applicants Get Caught

The eligible applicant types are wide: research institutes, the public sector, academia, civil society organisations, and small and medium-sized enterprises in Sweden. Note the asymmetry — large companies are not in that list, while universities and institutes of any size are.

The formal requirements Vinnova checks before any assessment happens:

• Every participating organisation must be a legal entity. Private individuals and sole proprietorships (enskild firma) cannot participate. This catches independent consultants and one-person research operations every cycle.
• The coordinating party must be a Swedish legal entity conducting activities in Sweden.
• The project manager must be employed by the coordinating organisation. You cannot name an external consultant or a partner-organisation employee as project manager.
• Foreign actors without a registered Swedish branch or establishment may participate as project partners but cannot receive Vinnova funding. They can be in the planning project; they just carry their own costs.
• The planning project may last a maximum of 12 months, may not start before the decision date, and must end no later than one week after the target international call closes.
• Writing-consultancy costs must not exceed SEK 75,000 in the budget.
• The proposal must name a specific target call. For Horizon Europe, an open published call or a call published in a work programme, with a link to the specific call or relevant work programme attached. For any other international call, a direct link to the published and open call.
• Companies must attach a signed Vinnova certificate of support of minor importance (de minimis). No certificate, no grant — this is a formal rejection criterion, not something you can supply after the deadline.

Fail any of these and the application is rejected without assessment. Vinnova states this directly.

How the Money Is Calculated

There are two ceilings working at once, and confusing them is a common budgeting error.

The project ceiling depends on your intended role in the international proposal. Planning to join as a partner: up to SEK 300,000. Planning to coordinate: up to SEK 500,000, and to claim that level the planned international project must include at least three actors from three different countries.

The funding rate caps the grant at 80% of the planning project’s total eligible costs. At least 20% has to be self-financed by the project parties. So a coordinator seeking the full SEK 500,000 needs a planning project budgeted at SEK 625,000 or more, with at least SEK 125,000 coming from the parties’ own resources.

The per-organisation ceiling is separate and governed by state aid rules. Vinnova is clear that the maximum grant rate per planning project is not the same as the maximum allowable support level per participant. Two support grounds apply here:

• De minimis support for companies carrying out economic activity. These organisations can be financed up to 100% of their own costs, but only within a ceiling of €300,000 over a three-year period, counted across all funders and all projects. If your company has taken de minimis support elsewhere recently, that reduces what you can receive here. This is why the signed de minimis certificate is mandatory.
• Not state aid for organisations that do not conduct economic activity — typically universities, university colleges, research institutes and other public bodies. These can be financed up to 100% of their costs.

Whether an organisation conducts economic activity turns on whether it offers a service or product on a market. Legal form, ownership, profit motive and funding source are all irrelevant to that test. A non-profit foundation can be conducting economic activity; a limited company might not be. Vinnova places responsibility for that assessment on the organisation itself, but invites you to contact the call manager if you are unsure. Take that invitation — a misclassification discovered after decision is a much larger problem than an email in September.

Vinnova also runs a financial and organisational status check before granting funds, using credit information currently sourced from Dun & Bradstreet. Organisations funded for salary costs must be registered as employers with the Swedish Tax Agency; if registration is not in place at decision time you must show that notification has been filed, and retroactive registration is not accepted. SMEs may be asked to demonstrate they have the financial means to deliver the project as budgeted, and cannot cover those costs with other public funding or with own funds already earmarked for another project.

How Applications Are Assessed

Applications that clear the formal requirements are distributed to assessors and scored in competition with each other. The assessment group combines external evaluators with Vinnova staff, and the resulting recommendation feeds a Vinnova decision. Vinnova explicitly reserves the right to apply a portfolio perspective when selecting — meaning a strong application can still lose to a comparably strong one that fills a gap in the portfolio.

Three criteria structure the scoring.

Potential is assessed at two levels. For the planning project itself: how much potential it has to develop and strengthen a competitive international proposal; how well it can engage relevant national and international actors into a strong consortium; and how well it analyses the needs, challenges and conditions facing the main project. For the main project as described in your planning application: how likely it is to be competitive and win funding in the target call; its level of innovation relative to existing solutions, the state of knowledge and ongoing international initiatives; how credible its problem-solution logic and expected results are; and its potential to contribute to gender equality, sustainable social development and global sustainability.

Actors covers the project team’s capacity, competence and ability to develop a competitive international proposal — including any consultants hired — plus how well consultancy needs are justified where a party’s budget includes them, and how equally financial contribution, participation, power and influence are distributed between women and men in the team.

Feasibility covers how realistic, credible and appropriate the schedule and budget are; how effective the planned activities are at strengthening the international proposal and, where relevant, deepening collaborations; how well consultancy and licence needs are justified where they exceed 20% of an organisation’s budget; and how well gender distribution and sex and gender perspectives are integrated into the project plan.

Gender equality is not a box to tick at the end. It appears in all three criteria, and Vinnova asks applicants to do two specific things: account for the gender balance of the project team, and assess whether sex and gender aspects are relevant to the design of the project and, if so, in what way. A candid “we assessed this and here is why sex and gender are not analytically relevant to a materials process” is a legitimate answer. Silence is not.

One further instruction sits inside the assessment guidance and is easy to miss: if the target international call has its own co-funding or own-financing requirements, you must describe how you plan to meet them and secure the self-financing needed to run the main project. Reviewers are assessing whether the eventual bid is deliverable, not just writable.

How to Apply

Applications go through Vinnova’s e-services portal. You log in, complete the application form, attach the required documents, and mark the application as complete before the deadline. A confirmation email follows after the application period closes.

The form asks about the project, the participating organisations, and the budget. Attachments are tightly controlled: the signed de minimis certificate is mandatory for companies; supplementary graphic material is permitted where it is directly linked to sections of the proposal with references running both ways; and CVs or other free-text documents are not accepted. Do not attempt to route around the form’s length limits by attaching narrative — it will not be read.

Applications may be written in Swedish or English. If your consortium is international and your target call is Horizon Europe, English usually makes more sense, since much of what you write here will be recycled into the eventual bid.

Small and medium-sized enterprises should also know about EU SME Support, a free expert advisory service Vinnova points to from this call. It covers help with a first EU proposal, reworking after a rejection, and general questions about EU funding. Using it before you submit the planning grant application costs nothing and tends to sharpen the description of the target call and the consortium’s role.

Deadlines and What Happens Next

The call opened on 10 March 2026, held an information meeting on 25 March 2026 at 13:00, and closed its first application period on 21 April 2026 at 14:00 with decisions by 26 May 2026. The final application date is 6 October 2026 at 14:00, with decisions on that round indicated within roughly four to five weeks.

You may submit at any point before the final date; submitting before a cut-off simply means your application is assessed at that cut-off. Since only the October date remains, there is no scheduling advantage left in this cycle — but there is a practical constraint worth planning around. Your planning project cannot start before the decision date, and it must end no later than one week after the international call you are targeting closes. If your target Horizon Europe topic closes in, say, early 2027, you are working backwards from a fixed endpoint through a decision that lands in November 2026. That is a workable but not generous runway, and it is a reason to target a call with a deadline in mid-2027 or later if you have the choice.

The absolute outer boundary is 31 January 2028: no funded planning project may run past that date.

Preparation Strategy

Pick the target call first, not the idea first. Everything in this application is judged against a specific published call. Applicants who arrive with a strong idea and then hunt for a topic to attach it to write visibly weaker applications than those who read the topic text, identified where their capability sits inside it, and built the plan from there.

Be honest about coordinator versus partner. The SEK 500,000 level requires a planned international project with at least three actors from three countries and a genuine intent to coordinate. Coordinating a Horizon Europe consortium is a substantial administrative undertaking; claiming the coordinator level without the institutional capacity to back it will show up under the Actors criterion.

Budget the partner meetings properly. Consortium formation is what planning grants are actually for, and it is where the value compounds. A budget dominated by internal writing time and light on partner engagement reads as a proposal that will be assembled rather than built.

Respect the SEK 75,000 writing-consultancy cap explicitly. If you are using a proposal-writing consultancy, show the number in the budget and show what the rest of the consultancy spend — if any — buys instead. Vinnova assesses the justification for consultancy separately, and applies extra scrutiny where consultancy and licence costs exceed 20% of an organisation’s budget.

Attach the right link. For Horizon Europe, a link to the specific call or the relevant work programme. For any other international call, a direct link to the published, open call. Vinnova treats this as an eligibility requirement, not a nicety.

Prepare the de minimis certificate early if you are a company. Get the signature before the last week. This is the single most avoidable cause of formal rejection in Vinnova calls.

Common Mistakes

• Applying as a sole proprietorship or private individual. Not eligible, full stop.
• Naming an external project manager. The project manager must be employed by the coordinating organisation.
• Targeting a Eureka programme. Eureka Eurostars and its siblings are excluded from this call.
• Building a 12-month plan that ends after the target call closes. The project must finish within one week of that closing date.
• Assuming 100% funding. The project-level cap is 80%; at least 20% must be self-financed, and that self-financing has to be real and identifiable.
• Forgetting existing de minimis support. The €300,000 three-year ceiling counts every funder and every project, not just this one.
• Treating gender equality as a closing paragraph. It carries weight under all three criteria, including the distribution of financial contribution, participation, power and influence within the team.
• Padding with CVs. Free-text attachments beyond the permitted graphics are not accepted.
• Reading only the machine-translated English page. The Swedish text governs. On anything that touches a cost limit or an eligibility rule, verify against the original.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does winning a planning grant help my chances in the international call? Not directly — the international call is assessed by its own external panel with no knowledge of your planning grant. The benefit is indirect and real: funded time to build a consortium and write properly, rather than squeezing it around other work.

Can I apply for more than one planning grant? The call text does not state a per-organisation limit on applications, but each application must target a specific published international call, and each is assessed on its own merits in competition with the rest. Applying for two unrelated targets is a different situation from splitting one idea in two.

What if the international call I am targeting has not been published yet? Then this call is not open to you for that idea. The eligibility requirement is a published and open international call, or a Horizon Europe call published in a work programme. A work-programme entry is enough for Horizon Europe; a rumoured future topic is not.

Can a foreign partner receive any of the money? No. Foreign actors without a registered Swedish branch or establishment can participate in the planning project but cannot be funded by Vinnova. They carry their own costs — which is worth agreeing in writing before you submit.

Is there a stated total budget for the call? The call page sets out the per-project ceilings and the funding rate but does not state a total pot on the public page. Treat the SEK 300,000 and SEK 500,000 limits as the operative numbers for your planning.

Vinnova mentions targeted efforts — does that affect my chances? Vinnova notes a special effort on planning grants for applications across all Horizon Europe specialisations, plus a targeted effort on projects including actors from Brazil, Israel, Japan, Canada, Singapore, the United Kingdom, South Korea or Ukraine. That does not create a separate track, but it signals where the portfolio perspective may lean.

What if I am unsure whether my organisation conducts economic activity? Contact the call manager. The organisation remains responsible for the assessment, but getting Vinnova’s read before you build the budget is far cheaper than correcting it after a decision.

Official Links and Contacts

• Call page: https://www.vinnova.se/en/calls-for-proposals/utlysning-2026-00442/planning-grant-for-international-proposal-2026
• Call manager: Jennika Gill Noltorp, [email protected]
• Technical support for the e-services portal: [email protected], +46 8 473 32 99
• EU SME Support — free advisory service for Swedish SMEs on EU proposals, linked from the call page

Additional Vinnova contacts for specific thematic areas are listed under the “Questions?” section of the call page. If your question concerns fit — whether your target call qualifies, whether your role justifies the coordinator level — direct it to the call manager well before the first week of October, when response times lengthen.

Is This Worth Your Time?

If you are a Swedish research group, institute, SME, public body or civil society organisation with a serious intention to bid into a specific published international call, this is close to free money for work you would otherwise do unfunded and badly. SEK 300,000 to SEK 500,000 at an 80% rate buys real partner travel and real writing time.

If you have a general ambition to “get into Horizon Europe” without a named topic, come back when you have one. The application is built around the target call, and every assessment criterion refers to it. The planning grant rewards organisations that have already made the strategic decision and need help executing it — not organisations still deciding.

The final application date is 6 October 2026 at 14:00, and there is no third period after it.