Hilirisasi as National Policy — What Indonesia’s Research Agenda Means for Your Grant

Hilirisasi as National Policy — What Indonesia’s Research Agenda Means for Your Grant Prospects

Indonesia raised its national research funding ceiling to Rp12 trillion in 2026 — up from Rp8 trillion the previous year. That figure signals a policy commitment, but the direction matters as much as the scale. The new funding does not flow uniformly across research types: it is channelled through a framework anchored to eight national priority agendas, tied directly to President Prabowo Subianto’s Asta Cita governance roadmap, and administered through a grant architecture — BIMA and BRIN’s hilirisasi platform — designed specifically to convert university research into applied industrial and societal outcomes. For a BINUS lecturer preparing a grant proposal in 2026 or 2027, understanding this policy architecture is not background reading. It is a scoring advantage.

Grant applications in the Indonesian hilirisasi system are not evaluated in isolation. BIMA and BRIN reviewers assess proposals against their alignment with national priority sectors — and proposals that can credibly position their technology output within one of those sectors start the review process with a structural advantage over those that do not. Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Roadmap, launched in January 2026 by BRIN and the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, and Technology, lists eight priority agendas as the basis for research direction: food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, water security and sustainable environmental development, health sovereignty, strategic industry development, digital transformation, maritime and maritime resource management, and human capital development. (ANTARA News, January 2026 — Indonesia Launches National Research and Innovation Roadmap) These are the lenses through which grant applications are read. A proposal that opens with its contribution to national food security or digital transformation is not simply being strategic — it is speaking the evaluator’s language.

The formal policy anchor for the entire hilirisasi grant system is Asta Cita Priority No. 5: continuing hilirisasi and developing industries based on natural resource processing. When Kemdiktisaintek launched its 2025 hilirisasi programme, the official announcement described the programme explicitly as a strategic step in implementing this Asta Cita priority. (Kemdiktisaintek, May 2025 — Peluncuran Program Hilirisasi Riset Tahun 2025) The 2025 programme’s eight focus areas were pangan, energi terbarukan, kesehatan, transportasi, rekayasa keteknikan, pertahanan-keamanan, kemaritiman, and — critically for non-STEM researchers — sosial humaniora-pendidikan-seni-budaya. That last category is a formal acknowledgment that hilirisasi is not a STEM-exclusive mandate. Social innovation, educational technology, creative industry tools, and applied community-based research are explicitly included under the same national priority umbrella.

The implications for BINUS researchers are direct. BINUS spans Computer Science, Management, Communication, Law, Design, Psychology, Engineering, and more — a disciplinary range that maps across virtually all eight national priority sectors. Faculty working on adaptive learning systems, SME digitalisation tools, community health monitoring platforms, urban infrastructure design, or food supply chain analytics are all doing work that sits within the national agenda. The challenge is not research relevance — it is proposal framing. Many strong applications from Indonesian universities fail not on the quality of the research, but because the narrative does not make the sector alignment legible to a reviewer. The most common structural failure is a proposal that describes what the research does technically, without situating that technical work within the national problem it addresses.

The strategic approach — which BINUS RTT’s proposal development support specifically addresses — is to structure the opening section of any hilirisasi application around the national priority context first: describe the gap or challenge at the national sector level, then position the research as a direct response to a documented national need, and only then present the technical approach. This framing signals to reviewers that the researcher understands the grant’s purpose, and it creates a logical chain between the technology output and the sector-level impact that grant review rubrics reward.

One further consideration: the sectors receiving the most political attention from the Prabowo administration — food sovereignty and energy self-sufficiency — are the ones most likely to receive the greatest budget allocation in future cycles. BINUS researchers whose work intersects with pangan, energi, or kesehatan, and who frame it accordingly now, are positioning their research in the highest-priority review lanes for the grants that will open in 2027 and beyond.

BINUS RTT can help translate your existing research agenda into the strategic framing that hilirisasi reviewers respond to — including TRL documentation, sector alignment narrative, mitra positioning, and business model framing. Email tech.transfer@binus.edu to begin. For a full guide to all seven grant schemes and their alignment with Indonesia’s national research priority sectors, visit the Grant for Applied Research page at BINUS Technology Transfer.

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