Who is FWO

After the First World War (1914-1918), many agreed that the Belgian economy needed more innovation for the country to get back up on its legs. When on 1 October 1927 King Albert I called for a new impulse for fundamental scientific research as the basis for more applied research and economic development, he only voiced what had already taken root among other policy makers. One concrete result was the establishment on 27 April 1928 of the National Fund for Scientific Research (Nationaal Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek). As one of the first research councils on the European continent. At this point, it was business that took the lead.

The NFWO initially had to work with modest resources. During its first year of operation, it awarded 158 grants in total, a number that over the subsequent years would increase. From the outset, it funded fellowships and, in addition, awarded 'associate’ fellowships, somewhat comparable to today's postdoctoral mandate. During the first 25 years of its existence, the NFWO awarded 456 candidates, a modest number in a contemporary perspective. Today, the FWO alone funds an average of 850 basic research fellows per year. The growing trend in the number of PhD fellowships since 1928 showed a particularly marked increase in the 1960s. The democratisation of university education played a significant role in this. The channel for postdoctoral fellowships exhibited a similar trend. Established academics could initially count on subsidies for scientists and resources for technical staff, research trips and equipment. It was only after the war that the research projects as we know them today were added. Already from the outset, applications submitted to the NFWO were decided on by 24 specialist scientific committees. The boundaries between basic and applied research were less defined then than now, however.

In response to the cross-border deployment of the sciences, the NFWO strengthened its international ties over the years. In 1974, for example, it was among the founding members of the European Science Foundation (ESF), and the FWO has, since then, continued its commitment to cooperation in Europe and with partners elsewhere in the world. The transnational dimension was further highlighted by travel grants and the encouragement of international scientific contacts in the context of research fellowships and projects.

The democratisation of higher education and the concept of the welfare state had a major impact on NFWO. As did Belgium's transformation into a federal state. From 1969, one year before the first reform of the Belgian state along community lines, the committees and the Board of Trustees were composed on the basis of language parity. In 1988, when a new state reform shifted science policy to the communities, a 'federalisation' of the FWO itself began. That process finally led to the creation in 1996 of the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen (FWO), which concluded its first management agreement with the Flemish community the following year. The FWO saw its funds increase in the following years. The Flemish Community became the largest funder and today accounts for about 80 per cent of the FWO budget. In 2006, the FWO received the status of Foundation of Public Utility by Royal Decree and in 2009 it became an externally independent agency (EVA) by decree.

The FWO was for years the main supporter of fundamental research support. In 2014, however, the new Flemish coalition agreement contained a radical policy that disbanded the IWT which saw its programmes split between the FWO and the Flemish Agency for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (VLAIO). The guiding principle in this reform was that academic researchers could primarily turn to the FWO and business to VLAIO. In line with this, the IWT programmes for strategic basic research (SBO) projects, the grants for predoctoral strategic basic research (SB grants) and applied biomedical research (TBM) were transferred to the FWO. It is, after all, academic institutions and their scientists that are taking the lead in this. The Hercules Foundation, which had been responsible for funding large and medium-sized research infrastructure since 2007, was also incorporated into the FWO. The expansion of the FWO offer and its administrative translation entailed quite a reform. This is now being fully rolled out.

The FWO has, of course, continued to evolve but has consolidated around the new and larger set of programmes and missions that had emerged since 2014. In 2022, the organisation moved to a new address at Leuvenseweg 38 in Brussels, which, as Hoek38, also is a home for Flemish science.