Fellowships can have a duration of between 1 and 12 months if full-time, and between 2 and 24 months if part-time.

Grants awarded under this programme will be subject to the General Block Exemption Regulation (GBER) under EU State aid guidelines.

The maximum Research Ireland contribution to the cost of each Fellowship is €100,000 direct costs to support the Fellow’s salary/teaching buy-out, travel and open access costs only. The industry partner must support the remaining costs related to the project in line with the permitted aid intensities under State aid guidelines.

As Research Ireland works to align the suite of enterprise facing fellowship programmes previously offered by SFI and IRC we are making some preliminary changes to the Industry RD&I Fellowship Programme, these include: 

• We will accept applications from all disciplines. 
• Charities and NGOs are eligible partners subject to them meeting the State aid requirements set out in the Programme Call.  
• A third research category (Fundamental Research) has been introduced to facilitate partnerships with Charities and NGOs. 

Enterprise Fellowship Call 2025 information webinar 14^th of May 2025:

• Call Document
• Applicant CV template
• Academic Collaborator CV template
• Budget template
• Financial Declaration template
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

The submission deadline is 15th July 2025, 13:00 (Dublin local time).

All proposals to the Placement Stream (Industry RD&I Fellowship) are to be submitted via SESAME, online grants and awards management system. If accessing SESAME for the first time, researchers should contact their local Research Office to get access to the system.  

For more information, view the SESAME User Guides and FAQs on the SFI website.

Please note that Research Ireland expects a high volume of applications to be submitted to this programme and has limited SESAME helpdesk resources. To avoid any delays in submission, researchers should familiarise themselves with the SESAME system and online help resources provided well in advance of the Research Ireland and institutional internal call deadlines.  

Queries relating to SESAME which are not answered in the SESAME FAQ document referred to above, should first be directed to your Research Body’s Research Office. If still unresolved, queries should be e-mailed to sesame@researchireland.ie . Please be aware that the response time for queries may be up to 5 working days.