NWO (Dutch Research Council)

NWO, the Dutch Research Council, is the main funder of NEON. It invests about one billion euros a year in Dutch research, from curiosity-driven science to research on societal challenges and the infrastructure that science needs.

NEON exists because of NWO's Crossover programme. Crossover was part of NWO's contribution to the Knowledge and Innovation Covenant 2018-2019. It funds large public-private consortia that cut across the Dutch top sectors, with partners contributing at least 30 percent. In December 2019 NWO selected five Crossover consortia. NEON was one of them, led by Eindhoven University of Technology with Maarten Steinbuch as main applicant, and received a grant of almost 8.5 million euros.

With that grant, NEON put more than thirty PhD candidates from seven universities and universities of applied sciences in one community with nearly thirty companies, grid operators, knowledge institutes and governments. Engineers working on kites, solar films and megawatt chargers worked next to psychologists, lawyers and transition scientists, around one question: how can we develop interdisciplinary methodologies and technologies to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy and mobility?

The programme runs from May 2020 to the end of 2026. Its final phase turns the results into a book, an online course and the closing symposium Systems in Transition.