Based on more than 20 years of experience in EU funded projects, including ERC since 2007, Enspire Science has developed a meticulous Pre-Award methodology that yields successful applications.

Horizon Europe pre-award approach

Enspire Science’s pre-award approach for successful Horizon Europe collaborative projects is based on the following pillars:

  • Target matching – The ‘top-down’ research approach requires a match between your proposal and the topic/theme. To achieve this we employ a free screening service, and only move forward once we are certain of a solid match.
  • Project initiation – The research project needs to be well-defined in terms of scope, targets, collaboration, intellectual property and other important aspects. Our team will help crystallize ideas, clarify research targets and define the measures needed for successful project initiation.
  • Proposal writing – To achieve funding, it is crucial to turn an excellent research idea into a complete and detailed plan. At Enspire Science, we deep-dive into the research project and help to crystallize messages to meet European research requirements. 
  • Partner search – Loose consortia, overlapping roles or missing skills are common causes for proposal rejection. Enspire Science assists in creating strong and well-balanced consortia from the initial moments of inception, negotiation, contracting and execution.

ERC pre-award approach

The ERC is a highly competitive funding opportunity that is quite counterintuitive in its requirements and expectations when compared to most other grants. Therefore, our pre-award methodology for ERC success is based on two very important aspects:

  • Understanding the basics – Having a full grasp of all official ERC requirements and expectations is an essential first step in the process of preparing an application. As we start the proposal preparation journey, we ensure all essential ERC aspects are the foundations on which we lay the groundbreaking and innovative research project idea.
  • Going above & beyond the basics – Once the foundations are in place, we strongly believe that what sets apart less competitive ERC grant proposals from the highly competitive ones is a firm grasp of the programme’s elusive and unwritten conceptual rules, which are known to be counterintuitive to many. Having worked with thousands of ERC applicants, we know how to decipher the elusive ERC “Excellence” essence (the sole criterion within the ERC work program). To achieve this, we work closely with ERC applicants – crystallizing their research project ideas, reviewing their writing to produce a unified and highly professional narrative voice, and helping them to perfectly articulate the “high risk/high gain”, non-incremental, open-ended, non-fragmented, hypothesis-driven etc. aspects that are so crucial in ERC.