VolkswagenStiftung Pioneering Research — Exploring the Unknown Unknown 2026: Up to €1.3 Million Over Three to Five Years for Deliberately Risky Basic Research, Ranked First by Fellow Applicants Through Distributed Peer Review

VolkswagenStiftung Pioneering Research — Exploring the Unknown Unknown 2026: Up to €1.3 Million Over Three to Five Years for Deliberately Risky Basic Research, Ranked First by Fellow Applicants Through Distributed Peer Review

Most research funders say they want bold ideas and then quietly reward the safest proposal in the pile — the one with three preliminary figures, a published pilot study, and a methods section that has already been de-risked by somebody else. The Volkswagen Foundation’s “Pioneering Research – Exploring the Unknown Unknown” initiative is built to do the opposite. It asks for projects where there is no preliminary work, where publications on the specific topic do not yet exist, and where a real possibility of failure is a feature of the proposal rather than something to be hidden.

The funding is substantial: up to €1.3 million for a project running a minimum of three and a maximum of five years, open to every discipline from particle physics to cultural studies. The deadline for anonymous short proposals is 27 August 2026 at 2:00 pm CEST, and the reference number for this round is A2026-11.

The selection process is unusual enough that it deserves as much of your planning attention as the science itself. In the first stage, the Foundation does not send your proposal to a hand-picked panel. It sends it to eight to ten of your competitors — and sends you up to eight of theirs to score in return. This is Distributed Peer Review, and if you miss the review deadline your own proposal is thrown out.

Key Details

What the Foundation Means by “Unknown Unknown”

The framing is precise, and it is the single thing most rejected applications get wrong. A “known unknown” is a gap you can already name and describe: a mechanism nobody has measured yet, a parameter that needs pinning down, a hypothesis the field agrees is worth testing. That work is valuable, and in Germany it is exactly what a DFG individual research grant exists to fund. The Foundation says so explicitly — projects that “would be eligible for funding by e.g. DFG individual research grants” are out of scope here.

The “unknown unknown” is territory the field has not yet learned to ask questions about. The guidelines give discipline-specific readings of what that can look like. In the life sciences, natural sciences, and engineering, it might mean generating breakthrough knowledge about fundamental principles of nature, finding new ways to investigate phenomena nobody has characterised, or building experimental approaches that push past the current limits of what is observable. In the humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences, it might mean theoretical models that offer genuinely new explanations for complex social, cultural, or historical phenomena, or new methods of interpretation that open up aspects of human experience that existing analysis cannot reach.

Every funded project must satisfy all of the following:

• It is clearly embedded in basic research.
• It is radically exploratory and breaks new scientific ground, with no publications on the specific research topic and as little preliminary work as possible.
• It has high scientific relevance and high knowledge potential, closing a large gap and giving fundamental new impetus to the community addressed — possibly beyond it.
• It could lead to important breakthroughs or even trigger a paradigm shift.
• It carries high conceptual or methodological risk. The hypotheses may turn out to be wrong; the methods may not work. The project must nevertheless be feasible in principle, methodologically sound, and balanced between potential knowledge gain and risk.
• The project leader or team is excellently qualified to carry it out and approaches the challenge with curiosity and a genuine willingness to take risks.

That last pairing — high risk and demonstrable feasibility — is the needle to thread. A proposal that is merely speculative fails on soundness. A proposal that is clearly going to work fails on risk.

What Is Explicitly Not Funded

The exclusion list in the guidelines is unusually direct, and reading it honestly against your own idea is the cheapest filter available:

• Incremental gains. Small progress in an existing field, or anything a standard research grant would cover.
• Continuation of your own work. The next logical step in your own research programme, or in the research community you belong to. This explicitly includes transferring or applying technologies and methods developed elsewhere to a new setting.
• Novelty by recombination. Claiming originality solely by combining established methods, or developing a method with no underlying scientific hypothesis.
• Application orientation. Projects aimed at translation or commercialisation from the outset.
• Clinical and therapeutic work. Development of therapies or diagnostics, and clinical trials.
• Purely PhD projects. If you plan to fund doctoral positions, the guidelines require you to think through the staffing concept carefully: even if the research project fails, the PhD must still be completable. That is a real design constraint on a risky project, not a formality.
• Overlap with the Foundation’s current thematic initiatives. Check the active portfolio before you write.

The Foundation also will not process an application that has been, or is intended to be, submitted in the same or similar form to another funding organisation.

Who Can Apply, and in What Constellation

Eligibility centres on Germany. Post-doctoral researchers and professors at German universities and other research institutions may apply, and all applicants must have completed a doctorate. Grants can only be awarded to scientific institutions, not to individuals or companies — though people at institutions that cannot receive funding may still join a project as cooperation partners.

International researchers can be included as Co-PIs. Where there is international participation, the partner at the German research institution must create the application on the funding platform and be defined as the PI; otherwise PI and Co-PI stand as equal partners.

Two constraints matter for how you assemble a team:

1. One proposal per person. Each individual may participate in only one short proposal in this round, whether as PI or as Co-PI. You cannot spread bets across several submissions, and you cannot lend your name to a colleague’s application while running your own.
2. One Co-PI at stage one. For technical and administrative reasons, only a single Co-PI can be added during the short proposal stage, and that person also takes part in the Distributed Peer Review. Additional Co-PIs can join at the full proposal stage. So a large consortium has to nominate its two front-line names now and expand later.

If you are not currently affiliated with a German research institution or university, you must upload a letter of intent from the institution where you plan to run the project. Start that conversation early — institutional signatures are the classic source of last-week panic.

The Distributed Peer Review Stage, in Detail

Stage one is double-blind. Short proposals are written anonymously, in English, and pitched at a broader scientific audience so that reviewers from outside your specialism can evaluate them. Submissions first pass an internal eligibility check on formal criteria; anything that fails the formal requirements is not reviewed at all.

Every formally correct proposal then enters DPR. Each short proposal is read by 8 to 10 other applicants, working from a standardised template. Matching is done on the areas of expertise applicants declare against the research areas of the projects, after a conflict-of-interest check. In return, you have roughly six weeks to complete up to eight reviews. The consequence of missing that deadline is stated without softening: exclusion from the procedure. Your own proposal dies.

Foundation staff use the collected reviews to build a final ranking. In the unlikely event of a tie, a lottery decides. Approximately the top 30 short proposals are invited to submit a full proposal, and every applicant — successful or not — receives feedback on their short proposal, which is worth more than it sounds when the reviewers are eight working researchers rather than one panel summary.

Stage two drops the anonymity. Invited applicants get detailed guidelines and a new deadline, with a minimum of six weeks to prepare. Full proposals are assessed by an international, interdisciplinary expert panel, and the Foundation’s CEO and Board of Trustees make the funding decision.

Timeline

Both online consultation sessions listed in the March 2026 guidelines fell before today’s date, so that route to asking questions has closed for this round. The Foundation notes that the DPR stage and an unexpectedly high volume of submissions can push dates back, and any delay will be communicated.

What You Have to Submit, and How

Applications go through the Volkswagen Foundation’s funding platform. Templates for the short proposal and the CV are downloadable from the platform and from the programme page, and the guidelines are firm that only those templates may be used.

• Short proposal. Follow the template’s page limit and formal specifications exactly. Written anonymously, in English, for a broad scientific readership. A brief, tentative expenditure plan is built into the template — this is not a full costed budget, but it should be coherent with the project you describe.
• Curricula vitae. For all applicants, in tabular, narrative form, following the CV template.
• Letter of intent. Required only if you are not currently at a German research institution or university.

Register on the platform early. Co-PIs can only be invited to work on an application once they themselves have registered, and that handshake is a common cause of avoidable delay in the final days. Technical and administrative questions go to [email protected].

One thing you cannot get is a pre-submission opinion on your idea. The Foundation states that it does not provide a preliminary assessment of fit, because the short proposal stage exists precisely to identify which proposals match the initiative.

Money, Overheads, and Open Science Obligations

The ceiling is €1.3 million across three to five years, and the guidelines ask that the budget reflect the actual requirements of the project and the team constellation rather than defaulting to the maximum. A well-argued €700,000 project is not disadvantaged against a padded €1.3 million one.

Public or non-profit scientific institutions in Germany can claim 10% overheads on top of direct project costs, with the notable exception of Max Planck, Leibniz, Fraunhofer, and Helmholtz institutes. Comparable scientific institutions abroad are treated the same way.

The Foundation is committed to Open Science. It expects results to be published open access and data to be made available for scientific reuse under the FAIR principles through recognised repositories such as those in the NFDI, re3data, and RI-sources. There is a separate Data Reuse module offering additional funding to prepare and store research data, which can be applied for during the project or up to six months after it ends. Two further add-ons — Sustainability Funds and Equal Opportunity Funds — are also available to funded projects.

How to Make the Short Proposal Competitive

The double-blind, cross-disciplinary review is the design constraint that should shape your writing. Eight to ten people will read your proposal, and most of them will not be in your subfield. They are also, at that moment, your competitors, working through a standardised scoring form under time pressure.

That has practical consequences:

• Make the gap legible in the first paragraph. A reviewer three disciplines away needs to understand what nobody knows, why nobody has asked, and what changes if you are right — before any technical detail lands.
• State the risk out loud. Name the assumption that could be wrong and the method that could fail. Reviewers are scoring against explicit criteria that include risk; a proposal that reads as safe is being scored down for it.
• Then earn the “feasible in principle” mark. Explain why this team, with these skills and this infrastructure, is the one that could pull it off. Since your CV is separate and the proposal is anonymous, feasibility has to come through in the logic of the plan, not through name recognition.
• Do not lean on preliminary data. The programme actively wants as little of it as possible. Substituting pilot results for a real argument about knowledge potential signals that the project belongs at the DFG instead.
• Strip the jargon. Anonymity plus interdisciplinary matching means clarity is a scoring advantage, not a stylistic preference.
• Sanity-check against the exclusion list. If a stranger could plausibly describe your project as “the next step in your line of work,” rewrite the framing or pick a different idea.

Common Mistakes

The failure modes here are distinctive to the programme rather than generic grant-writing errors.

Treating DPR as optional work. Applicants have been excluded for missing the review deadline. Block out time in November and December 2026 now, before you submit, because that obligation is binding from the moment your proposal is accepted as formally correct.

Submitting the same project elsewhere. Parallel submission to another funder in the same or similar form disqualifies the application.

Breaking anonymity by accident. Self-citations phrased as “our previous work,” named local facilities, or an acknowledgements line will all identify you in a double-blind read. Comb the text specifically for this.

Appearing on two proposals. The one-proposal-per-person rule catches collaborators who agree to be a Co-PI as a favour and then submit their own.

Ignoring the template. Applications that do not meet formal requirements are not reviewed. Page limits and template use are checked before any science is read.

Funding a PhD on a project that might fail. If doctoral positions are in the budget, show how the thesis remains completable in the failure scenario. Reviewers who have supervised PhD students will look for this.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a permanent position? No. Post-doctoral researchers and professors are both eligible. What matters is the doctorate and the institutional affiliation — or a letter of intent from the German institution that will host you and administer the funds.

Can I apply from outside Germany? Only as a Co-PI on an application led by a partner at a German research institution, who must be the PI and create the submission. Scientific institutions abroad can be involved, but the German lead requirement stands.

I already hold an ERC grant or a Freigeist Fellowship. Am I locked out? No. The Foundation’s general FAQ says other funding is fine in principle, provided the Volkswagen Foundation application is clearly distinct in subject matter from what is already funded.

Can I submit two ideas? No — one project per deadline, and one proposal per person across the whole round.

Will someone tell me whether my idea fits before I write it? No. The Foundation declines to give preliminary assessments for this initiative, because the short proposal stage is itself the fit test.

What happens if I am not among the top 30? You still receive feedback on your short proposal drawn from the DPR round — eight to ten structured reads on an early-stage idea, which is a genuinely useful input for reworking the project for another funder or a future call.

Can the project be a collaboration? Yes; projects from all constellations and disciplines are welcome. Just remember that only one Co-PI can be attached at the short proposal stage, with the rest added if you reach the full proposal.

Contacts and Official Links

• Programme page: Pioneering Research – Exploring the Unknown Unknown, where the guidelines, DPR rules, short proposal template, and CV template are all available for download.
• Programme directors: Dr Pavel Dutow and Dr Theresa Kratzsch — [email protected]
• Administrative and scheduling questions: Birgit Niemann — [email protected], +49 511 83 81-341
• Platform and technical support: [email protected]
• Postal address: VolkswagenStiftung, Kastanienallee 35, 30519 Hannover, Germany

Next Steps

With roughly a month left before the 27 August 2026 deadline, the sequence that works is: read the guidelines and the DPR Rules and Guidelines in full; confirm that your idea survives the exclusion list; register yourself and your Co-PI on the funding platform; download the current templates and write to them; secure a letter of intent if you need one; and commit the November–December review window in your calendar before you press submit. If the idea you are considering is one you could defend at the DFG, it is probably the wrong idea for this call — and the more interesting question is what you would work on if a failed result were an acceptable outcome.