Criteria for applying

An individual, a working group or a legal entity can apply for a grant from Kone Foundation. If you’re applying as a legal entity, you need to have a Finnish business ID.

Kone Foundation grants can be applied for:

  • academic research in the humanities, social sciences, environmental sciences and artistic research
  • professional artistic work in all fields of art
  • multidisciplinary work in the above-mentioned fields of art and research
  • promotion of academic and/or artistic work in the above-mentioned fields (e.g. a project developing the field) 
  • promotion and dissemination of academic and/or artistic work in the above-mentioned fields (e.g., research popularisation, artistic outreach, events and publications)
  • other cultural work; but this is rarely funded

An individual, a working group or a legal entity can apply for a grant from Kone Foundation. If you’re applying as a legal entity, you need to have a Finnish business ID. If the applicant is a working group or legal entity, the group members must choose a project leader from among themselves to be responsible for submitting the application.

To receive funding, projects must have a connection to Finland. In general, Kone Foundation’s grants are intended for:

• Finns, for work carried out in Finland or abroad

• foreigners, for work carried out in Finland

• foreigners, for project work that includes participants based in Finland

The following application processes apply criteria that differ from above:

If the work to be done is not artistic or academic, one should apply for a grant to pay salary expenses.  

The topic of the project applied for can be freely chosen, as long as the discipline belongs to the fields funded by the Foundation. A grant from Kone Foundation must be used for the purpose for which it is awarded.

How long can the funding period be?

A grant may be awarded for a maximum of four years at a time (also the combined duration of consecutive funding periods for the same project). In the annual call, grants are awarded for work that starts the year after the decision, at the earliest in January.

Grants are not awarded retroactively.

We encourage long-term work in both research and the arts. As a rule, we do not fund working periods of less than six months for individual applicants. In working groups the minimum duration of a personal grant for research or artistic work is one month.