New organisational structure NWO and FOM announced

These changes will have major consequences for the FOM organisation. The board and directors are convinced that this embedding in the new NWO organisation will provide opportunities for physics while largely retaining FOM's strengths and - where applicable - using these more widely within NWO. The Executive Board will advise the Governing Board and Central Works Council of FOM to agree with the restructuring and integration of FOM within the new NWO organisation.

The new NWO
The most important units of the proposed new NWO organisation are a Governing Board and four science domains: mathematical and natural sciences, technical and applied sciences, health research and development, and social sciences and humanities. The Governing Board of NWO will have six members; the four scientific members will also be the chairs of the domain boards. The board of the mathematical and natural sciences domain will mainly be made up of active top scientists. A broad Advisory Board that will also contain representatives drawn from society will advise about large cross-domain subjects and initiatives that directly fall under the responsibility of the Governing Board. In the new model the institutes also fall under the responsibility of the Governing Board, which will supervise the integration of the scientific strategy of the domains and institutes.

Integration of the existing agencies will facilitate cross-fertilisation and coherence within the organisation, while the dividing up in domains safeguards that specific knowledge of and connection with scientific practice remains possible. For the management and support of the NWO institutes FOM, a separate organisational unit will be formed, for which FOM will be a model.

This proposal for the new structure of NWO has been realised by a workgroup consisting of three members from the Governing Board of NWO, three NWO division directors and a chair from one of the NWO institutes under the independent chairmanship of professor Douwe Breimer.

Position of FOM
Right from the start FOM has recognised the need to change the NWO organisation to make it easier to work across the disciplines and to realise a more coherent and powerful organisation. In the dialogue with other disciplines and external parties FOM has clearly conveyed this position in order to realise it. At the same time it had to be guaranteed that the high quality of Dutch science, and physics in particular, would be retained in this process and, if possible, be further improved.

For FOM it was therefore vitally important that several success factors would be included in the new organisation. The two most important are: i) main division along disciplinary lines, with clustering of the disciplines in a well-organised number of domains and ii) 'top scientists behind the steering wheel'. In addition FOM considers it important that best practices are retained and, where possible, more broadly shared. For example, FOM has a broad expertise in the areas of supporting large, internationally oriented institutes and intensive collaboration with industry.

FOM chair Niek Lopes Cardozo, who was actively involved in the development of this proposal as a member of the workgroup: "The proposed new NWO organisation means in effect that FOM as we currently know it will cease to exist. That is a huge step. FOM has an outstanding reputation among the researchers it supports and its stakeholders. Nevertheless we are convinced that for the field, physics and physicists, it is better to integrate in a broad natural sciences domain. We are increasingly running up against the limitations of the current disciplinary structure of NWO. For example, the boundaries between chemistry and the life sciences are fuzzy and the current structure sometimes makes it difficult to do justice to research in the boundary areas. That is even more the case for broader, cross-disciplinary programmes. The new organisation deals with these shortcomings in an inventive manner, partly by clustering in larger domains and via a direct line between the board and these domains. Active scientists will continue to have the leading role in the selection of the best research. And for the position of the institutes, a model has been found that realises the desired separation of 'management' and 'granting' while at the same time ensuring a good harmonisation between institutes and domains. The Executive Board of FOM sees a clear added value in this model for Dutch science in general and physics in particular. The board will therefore work on ensuring that the new NWO is a success and on enabling the FOM's best practices to bear further fruit."

FOM director Wim van Saarloos: "We are glad that this plan creates a positive future within the new NWO, and that the passion and drive with which our employees have worked for science, our organisation and the connection with the field, will also be given plenty of opportunity in the future. We will work on fully utilising the new possibilities for encouraging cross-fertilisation and collaboration together with our colleagues in other disciplines and for realising a powerful and flexible NWO."

Due to these changes the strategic plan of FOM/N, finalised at the end of 2014, should be regarded more as the vision that FOM will contribute to the new organisational units than as a plan that can be realised in its entirety. For the 1.100 FOM employees nothing will change in their employment contract in the coming years. Current projects and programmes will not change. The funding instruments will also continue to exist for the time being. FOM will keep its employees and stakeholders well informed about any new developments, and will see to it that researchers will be informed well ahead of time of any future changes in funding schemes.

Contact information:
Gabby Zegers, Head of Communication at FOM, +31 30 600 12 22.

You can download the full report of the Breimer workgroup (in Dutch) on the top right of this webpage.