Indonesia’s Hilirisasi Push Is Creating a Window — And It Won’t Stay Open Forever

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In early 2026, President Prabowo Subianto met with over 1,200 professors, deans, and rectors at the Presidential Palace and told them directly: university research must prioritize food self-sufficiency, energy self-sufficiency, industrialization, and downstreaming — and the government would back that priority with a research budget increase from Rp8 trillion to Rp12 trillion for 2026 (Antara News, 2026 — Presidential Briefing with University Leaders). This is not a policy document or a ministry aspiration. It is the president of Indonesia, in the room with university leadership, naming applied industry-linked research as a national investment priority and increasing the budget ceiling by 50 percent to support it. For a BINUS lecturer with research output that could speak to any of those priority domains, this is the most unambiguous funding signal in at least a decade.

The policy context behind that statement is the Asta Cita framework — the eight-mission platform of the Prabowo-Gibran administration, of which hilirisasi and industrialization is explicitly the fifth mission: “melanjutkan hilirisasi dan industrialisasi untuk meningkatkan nilai tambah dalam negeri.” Kemdiktisaintek has operationalized this into a program architecture called Diktisaintek Berdampak, which is designed to make university research outcomes measurable, sustained, and directly relevant to industry and society. Under this umbrella, the Hiliriset program — Hilirisasi Riset Prioritas — has become the primary funding vehicle for industry-linked university research at national scale.

The 2025 Hiliriset data shows what that scale looks like in practice. Kemdiktisaintek funded 794 proposals under three schemes — SINERGI (industry-partnered research), Dorongan Teknologi (commercialization of university products), and Ajakan Industri (industry-problem-led research) — with total funding of Rp177 billion (Kemdiktisaintek, September 2025 — Penandatanganan Kontrak Hiliriset 2025). Of those funded, 373 came from the SINERGI scheme alone, where the baseline requirement is that the researcher already has an industry partner. The Ajakan Industri scheme saw 161 industry-submitted challenges generate 125 active university-industry partnerships. The pattern is unmistakable: the funded proposals are not the most academically sophisticated. They are the ones where an industry relationship already exists.

The SINERGI 2026 program, which offers up to Rp2 billion per project per year, makes this requirement explicit: the lead researcher must have a minimum of two internationally reputable journal publications or two non-copyright HKI registrations as first inventor, and must already have an industry partner committed to the collaboration (Kemdiktisaintek, 2025 — Panduan SINERGI TA 2026). This is the structural implication that every BINUS lecturer needs to understand. The government has built a Rp2 billion per year funding instrument. The eligibility gate is having an industry partner already in place. BINUS RTT’s ISM program is precisely the mechanism for building that relationship before the next funding window opens.

The window argument is not hypothetical. Policy alignment of this clarity — a sitting president increasing the research budget, a dedicated ministry program (Diktisaintek Berdampak) with explicit industry-university linkage targets, and a funding architecture that rewards researchers with proven industry relationships — is not a permanent state. It reflects a particular political and economic moment: Indonesia’s push toward industrial value-add under the Asta Cita framework, which is itself tied to the current administration’s term. The institutions that build ISM track records between 2025 and 2027 — researchers with HKI portfolios, PKS agreements, and established industry partners — will be structurally positioned to win the next funding cycle regardless of how the specific program names or architectures evolve. The ones that wait will be building from scratch when the eligibility requirements are already steep.

For a BINUS lecturer assessing this from a career and research strategy perspective, the question is not whether hilirisasi is a genuine national priority — the budget figures answer that. The question is whether your research is positioned to participate in the ecosystem being built around it right now. Registering on BRIDGE, attending ISM Day, developing your first PKS through an RfP response — these are the moves that build the track record that SINERGI, Hiliriset, and their successors will require as entry conditions in 2027 and beyond.

Waiting is a strategy. But it is a strategy that gets more expensive with every funding cycle that passes. For a detailed map of how BINUS RTT connects your research to the industry relationships that unlock this ecosystem, visit the Industry Partnership & Solution Matching page on BINUS RTT.

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