Hilirisasi Grants Are Not Just for Engineers — A Guide for Social Science, Design, and Health Researchers

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When Kemdiktisaintek launched the 2025 hilirisasi grant programme, one of its eight declared focus areas was sosial humaniora-pendidikan-seni-budaya — social humanities, education, arts, and culture. Not buried as an afterthought: listed alongside food technology, renewable energy, and engineering as an equal priority in a programme designed explicitly to push research out of the laboratory and into society. That inclusion was not symbolic. It reflected a growing recognition within Indonesian research policy that the most persistent barriers to national development — in health adoption, financial literacy, educational access, community resilience, and digital inclusion — are not engineering problems. They are behavioural, cultural, and systemic ones. And those require researchers from psychology, communication, law, design, and social science to solve.

The misconception that hilirisasi grants are reserved for STEM researchers is one of the most widely held and most costly beliefs in Indonesian academic culture. At BINUS specifically, it means that faculty across Communication, Psychology, Business, Law, Interior Design, and the humanities are routinely sitting out grant cycles that were designed with them in mind. The practical consequence is not just missed funding — it is a missed opportunity to generate the IP, mitra partnerships, and validated social innovation outputs that career advancement and institutional KPI targets now require.

The primary grant scheme for non-STEM researchers is Bestari Saintek. Among all seven hilirisasi schemes accessible to BINUS lecturers, it has the lowest eligibility barriers: no S3 required, no granted patent mandatory, a Lektor functional rank and at least one Scopus or WoS publication are sufficient. The programme funds the creation of a living lab — a real-world research setting where academics, community, industry, and government collaborate around applied science with tangible societal outcomes. This structure is a natural fit for BINUS researchers working in educational technology, community health communication, urban liveability design, financial inclusion systems, or small business capacity building. The living lab model is not abstract: it is a funded, multi-stakeholder field deployment of your research — exactly what the term “applied” means in a non-laboratory context.

SINERGI — the Hilirisasi Riset Berbasis Transfer Teknologi Terintegrasi scheme — is also explicitly open to social innovations, not only product-based technologies. Its mandate is the structured transfer of research-based solutions from university to industry or government, and “solution” includes methods, systems, strategies, and service models as well as physical prototypes. A BINUS Business researcher who has developed a validated SME digitalisation framework and has a government agency or industry association willing to adopt and scale it has a SINERGI-eligible project. A Communication researcher whose community health campaign model has been piloted and documented is not far from the same threshold.

The key shift in framing is moving from “outputs” to “applied products.” Hilirisasi review panels evaluate non-STEM proposals using the same fundamental question as STEM ones: what does this research produce that a mitra can adopt, deploy, or commercialise? For non-STEM researchers, the answers are programme models, training toolkits, community engagement frameworks, platform architectures, communication protocols, legal templates, or policy recommendations developed from primary evidence. These are creditable outputs under the TRO (Teknologi yang Relevan dengan Output) and NTRO (Non-Traditional Research Output) categories that both Bestari Saintek and SINERGI recognise.

A concrete example from the Indonesian national hilirisasi landscape: UGM’s PRIMESTeP programme — backed by the Asian Development Bank and Kemdiktisaintek — explicitly included mental health startup development and smart agriculture social enterprise innovation among the research commercialisation projects showcased at its 2025 review mission. Neither of these is a hardware product. Both proceeded through the same applied research-to-deployment pathway as engineering prototypes, with industry mitra involvement, IP registration, and validated community impact as deliverables. (UGM Directorate of Business Development, June 2025 — PRIMESTeP 2025 Mission Review)

BINUS RTT’s grant matching consultation covers non-STEM research equally — the process of mapping your research stage, publication track record, and mitra landscape to the right scheme applies regardless of discipline. If you have community-facing research with a willing government or NGO partner, or a validated organisational method that an industry mitra would benefit from adopting, start the conversation. The ISM program at RTT can help identify the right non-traditional mitra type for your research — local government agencies, industry associations, BUMN social development arms, and NGOs all count as eligible mitras under Bestari Saintek and SINERGI.

For a full overview of all seven hilirisasi grant schemes — including the Bestari Saintek scheme and its specific eligibility requirements for non-STEM researchers — visit the Grant for Applied Research page at BINUS Technology Transfer.

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