The research training will concentrate on four areas of great interest to the consortium partners. After a general description of each area and the research directions currently pursued, specific research training projects are being proposed for individual SAGA fellows for a long-term labour contract, identified for later reference by the area and the proposing partner that will be the main host for the fellow. Also possible cooperation partners for each project within the consortium are identified. For all projects, there is at least one cooperating partner from a different sector, i.e., if proposed by an academic partner, a cooperating partner from a research institute or industry, and vice versa. All partners – except SINTEF – are proposing at least one such individual full-length project for training-through-research of an Early Stage Researcher (ESR), while SINTEF will offer shorter fellowships.

There will be the project rule that each fellow (with a recruitment period of at least 12 months) will spend a considerable amount of time (between 3 and 9 months, but not more than 30% of the recruitment period) on a secondment at a cooperating institution from a different sector. As also addressed in more detail later on, most of the projects could be assigned to an early Post Doc (ER) as well. We have also chosen to present more problems than actually available ESR fellowships to allow for some flexibility depending on the qualifications of the available candidates. This also includes the possibility of creating yet another project, within the described research areas of course, tailored to pre-existing knowledge of a candidate, as we believe that too stringent demands could jeopardize successful recruitment of the most attractive candidates.