Budapest, 16 March 2026 – The National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NRDI Office) is reopening its popular call, which provides Hungarian businesses, research organisations, and individuals with non-refundable funding of up to HUF 7.5 million for activities related to the protection of their intellectual property.

The total budget of HUF 500 million of the call for proposals may be used – in addition to official fees related to obtaining domestic and international protection – for covering the costs of intellectual property advisory services or related agency services, which costs may be even more substantial than the aforementioned fees.

Research and development results and innovative ideas can be most effectively exploited if they are properly protected by law. This step is vital to ensure that the resources invested – time, money, expertise – not only pay off, but also bring long-term market advantage and appropriate benefits. A key objective of the John von Neumann Programme is to increase the patenting activity of Hungarian businesses and universities.

For years, the NRDI Office has been offering targeted funding schemes to ensure that the widest possible range of applicants – even the smallest micro-enterprises or individual inventors – can take advantage of this opportunity to obtain protection from the Hungarian Intellectual Property Office (HIPO) for their newly developed products, technologies, or brands.

“In recent years, there has been a clear increase in industrial property protection activities in Hungary, and the number of applications filed with the Hungarian Intellectual Property Office has also risen. Universities have performed exceptionally well in this field, which clearly reflects the growing strength of innovation efforts at domestic research organisations. All of this also indicates that an environment conducive to innovation is increasingly taking shape in Hungary, one that strengthens confidence in intellectual property protection procedures and encourages the pursuit of legal protection for new solutions,” said Szabolcs Farkas, HIPO President.

Zsuzsa Szabados, Vice President for Business Innovation at the NRDI Office, emphasized on the occasion of the call’s reopening: “The increasingly deliberate use of the tools of intellectual property protection makes it possible for research results and innovative ideas to generate tangible competitive advantage, significant added value, and economic returns. We have been supporting this objective for years through similar funding schemes – in the period since 2015, 920 proposals were granted a total of nearly HUF 1.3 billion in funding for the protection of intellectual property.”

For more details on the call, please visit the NRDI Office’s website.