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The Global Pivot to Applied Research Funding — and Why Indonesia Is Ahead of the Curve

When South Korea’s government-backed TIPS program was assessed after more than a decade of operation, the results were hard to ignore: over 3,200 startups supported, KRW 15 trillion attracted in follow-on private investment, and more than 22,500 new jobs created — all from a program built not around rewarding academic publication, but around tying research funding directly to commercialisation outcomes. In 2023, CB Insights ranked TIPS among the Top 4 Global Accelerators worldwide. The model was not Korean exceptionalism; it was the clearest expression of a global research funding shift already well underway. (Korea.net Press Release, November 2024 — TIPS 10-Year Evaluation and Strategy)

For most BINUS lecturers, the change in Indonesia’s grant landscape — from paper-based outputs toward prototypes, patents, and industry partnerships — can feel sudden and locally driven. It is neither. The same fundamental realignment has been reshaping research funding systems across the EU, South Korea, and the wider OECD for over a decade. Understanding that context changes how a BINUS researcher should think about the hilirisasi grant system: not as a local compliance requirement, but as Indonesia’s version of a global policy turn that every major research economy has already made. BINUS researchers who win SINERGI or RIKUB grants this cycle are not adapting to a policy quirk — they are participating in the direction global research has been moving since the 2010s, and building a profile increasingly recognised internationally.

The scale of the international shift is well-documented. The EU’s Horizon Europe programme — with an indicative budget of €95.5 billion for 2021–2027 — organises its largest funding pillar, Global Challenges and Industrial Competitiveness, around collaborative research tied explicitly to real-world outcomes at TRL 5 to 8. Innovation Actions, one of its core funding instruments, support prototype-stage research at 70% of costs for industry applicants and 100% for non-profits, with prototyping, testing, and market validation as required deliverables. For the 2026–2027 work programme, which released €14 billion in December 2025, Pillar II covering applied industry-linked research accounts for the majority of allocated funds. (European Commission, Horizon Europe 2026–2027 Work Programme, December 2025) The OECD’s Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2025 describes this pattern as part of a broader evolution toward what its analysts term “Innovation Policy 3.0” — a framework in which governments steer research investment toward defined societal and economic transformation goals rather than simply subsidising scientific output. Even as overall OECD-area government R&D allocations fell by 1.9% in 2024, the share directed toward industry-science linkage and knowledge transfer instruments continued to grow as a proportion of total funding. (OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2025, October 2025)

Indonesia’s alignment with this direction is deliberate and accelerating. In January 2026, Indonesia raised its national research funding ceiling to Rp12 trillion — up from Rp8 trillion the previous year — as BRIN and the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, and Technology jointly launched the National Research and Innovation Roadmap. The roadmap anchors national research priorities to eight specific agendas tied directly to economic and societal sovereignty: food, energy, water security, health, strategic industries, digital transformation, maritime resources, and human capital development. BRIN Head Arif Satria explicitly called on universities to align their research to these priorities, stating that BRIN cannot deliver its hilirisasi mandate without universities as the primary engine. (ANTARA News, January 2026 — Indonesia Launches National Research and Innovation Roadmap) Kemdiktisaintek’s framing for the 2025 hilirisasi grant launch made the policy link even more direct: the program was described as a concrete implementation of Asta Cita Priority No. 5 — turning downstream research into applied industry value.

The architecture of Indonesia’s BIMA and BRIN hilirisasi grant schemes mirrors the international model in structure: tiered by TRL stage, requiring industry co-investment that scales with the project year, and producing deliverables — IP, validated prototypes, licensing agreements, spin-offs — that are defined before funding is released. A BINUS researcher examining RIKUB (up to Rp1.6 billion for a multi-university consortium producing a commercialisation-ready prototype) should find it familiar: the structure is built on the same logic as Horizon Europe’s Innovation Actions or South Korea’s industry-university consortium programmes.

The practical takeaway is straightforward. If your research has a real-world application — a prototype, a system, a method that an industry or government mitra could use — there is now a grant scheme built specifically for your stage. BINUS RTT’s grant matching consultation is the right starting point: a structured assessment of where your current TRL, publication record, and industry connections map against the seven live schemes. That consultation should happen before the next BIMA or BRIN submission window opens, not after. If you are not yet at TRL 6, RTT’s Product Strategic Roadmap service can show you the specific development path — and which internal PIB-T grant can bridge the gap while you prepare for external submission.

For a full guide to all seven hilirisasi grant schemes available to BINUS researchers — including eligibility criteria, funding amounts, and submission windows — visit the Grant for Applied Research page at BINUS Technology Transfer.

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