CCAN welcomes the announcement of SFI's SCDA pilot programme which presents funded opportunities for SFI researchers to collaborate with CCAN, and other SFI funded clusters. This is the first step towards a multi-agency, nationally focussed funding programme and is welcomed and strongly supported by CCAN. More details below.

Science Foundation Ireland have announced a pilot funding programme targeting collaboration between exisiting SFI researchers, companies and including Technology (Competence) Centres.

See the SCDA section of this link for more details.

Strategic Collaborative Development Award (SCDA)

In parallel with the main SFI Research Centres call, SFI will issue a call for proposals for Strategic Collaborative Development Awards (SCDA). The SCDAs will be short-term awards (6-18 months) with funding in the range of €50-200k. The aim of the SCDAs will be to facilitate multi-PI clusters to engage in an exploratory collaboration with another party, such as another research centre (e.g Technology Centre) or cluster, or a new industry partner company.

Programme Outline

An information meeting was held on 26 January 2012 providing the outline to the programme. The presentation delivered at that meeting can be downloaded here: SCDA presentation

Suggestions

SFI is soliciting suggestions in advance of finalising the details of the programme design and publishing a Call for Proposals document. Suggestions will be accepted up to close of business on 10 February 2012, and should be sent to SCDA@sfi.ie.

The application process involves a single stage. The outline schedule for the programme is provided below.

As indicated above, SFI intends to publish the 2012 Strategic Collaborative Development Award (SCDA) Programme Call for Proposals at the end of February 2012. The call document will be published on the SFI website.