10 Common Mistakes in EU Research Funding Proposals
and how to avoid them
The EU is poised to nearly double its research and innovation funding, increasing from €95.5 billion to €175 billion over the next seven years. If you are a researcher, this is, for once, good news. It is not only good news for European researchers. For health-related topics, US researchers are also eligible for funding.
The challenge is that EU funding rounds are highly competitive, and that is likely to become even more the case. There are two aspects that make developing EU funding proposals particularly challenging:
The format, tone, and focus of an EU funding proposal diverge significantly from what you write in a scientific paper.
A large proportion of the funding goes to consortium projects, which means having to bring together leaders across multiple disciplines and getting them to align and agree on the design of a project.
The second aspect, however, also points towards an opportunity. Consortium projects bring in substantial funding, but more importantly, they also give you access to the collective research resources of the entire consortium. By research resources I mean data, protocols, preclinical models, and expertise.
The opportunity becomes even more substantial when you consider that your best source of further funding, and of more consortium projects, is an existing consortium project.
Over the past 19 years, I have helped design and develop more than 60 medical research consortium projects, most of them for EU funding. I see the same mistakes made repeatedly.
It takes a lot of time and effort from everyone involved to develop an EU funding proposal. I see the same mistakes over and over again—mistakes I myself made. If you can avoid these mistakes, your chances of winning funding and multiplying your research resources go up dramatically.
Here are the 10 mistakes I see most often and how to avoid them.
10 Mistakes in EU Proposals
1. Not positioning the research
Something that took me a long time to understand when I transitioned from academia is that there is a spectrum of research and development along what is called the innovation value chain. The innovation value chain progresses from discovery to near commercial implementation.
While researchers often work, at least to some degree, across the whole spectrum of the innovation value chain, at any given time their focus may be on different ends of the spectrum. The problem is that the funding programs and the call topics have a particular range of the value chain in mind. A project that is taking a concept into the market has a different structure, set of activities, and outputs than one focused on discovery.
You have to include partners whose research is positioned for the particular call topic. The best type of partners are those who have positioned their work across the innovation value chain. With those types of partners as part of your consortium, you can target multiple funding opportunities.
I had a group of leading researchers come to me with a nearly completed proposal. They clearly had made an effort to include partners and activities that would allow for the rapid implementation of the project results. In my experience, it is often the case that a proposed project has no clear pathway to impact. However, in this case, the funding programme was focused on radical innovation. With some concentrated design sessions, we were able to make the proposal more radical—but the whole process would have been much more efficient if they had positioned their research first.
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2. Not defining the problem
It is very easy to forget about the problem you are working on, or at least let it drift away into a vague and hazy concept. However, when you pitch your research in a funding proposal, in my experience, those proposals where the problem is very clear are the ones that do best.
Often this is about granularity. In medical research, everyone is ultimately working on the problem of improving the lives of individuals suffering from a disease. I have found that it is best to go at least one level deeper in terms of granularity than what you initially think.
Getting clarity on the problem is even more important when the project is to be a consortium. The mistake I see all the time is that researchers start with the methods before defining the problem. The consequence is that you have many methods or activities planned, but they do not all address the same set of problems.
3. Work package titles that are too complicated
When I have examined the titles of work packages from successfully funded projects, they are mostly short and very clear: Management, Clinical Study, Genomics, etc.
When I first started helping develop proposals, I tried to create long, intriguing titles for each work package. It did not work. This led to an unavoidable expansion of the titles as I tied myself in knots trying to fit everything in. It is nearly impossible to capture the complexity in a concise title.
4. Ignoring risk planning
Risk planning is often an afterthought: “Oh, yeah, we’d better list out some risks.”
When people do put effort into risk planning, it is often focused only on mitigating risks. Very little thought is given to how to respond if the risk becomes a reality. However, knowing how you plan to respond is more important than your mitigation plan. Reviewers are more interested in how you will adapt to the inevitable problems that arise.
I have spent way too many informal conversations in project meetings perseverating with others about whether a certain bad outcome was going to happen. It would have been better to be thinking about what would happen if it did happen.
Even better is when you can link your risk response plans to particular milestones while designing a project.
5. Having deliverables that do not align with the objectives
Often the writing of the deliverables for a project comes towards the end of a development process. The consequence is that the deliverables sometimes don’t seem to line up with the objectives.
I have had multiple people who review EU grants tell me that the first thing they do is flip through a proposal until they reach the deliverables table. If they can’t make sense of the project just by reading the deliverables, they downgrade their opinion of the proposal.
Deliverables are a strategic aspect of your proposal, and if they are not clear and achievable they can make projects difficult during the implementation phase.
6. Ignoring exploitation planning
EU funding is about excellent science, but it is also about increasing economic competitiveness. Hence, the exploitation planning section of a proposal should be given time and effort. The more specific an exploitation plan is to a project, the more realistic it appears.
When generic platitudes about exploitation make up the exploitation section, the assessed impact of a project is diminished.
7. Light touch on data management
In the past few years, data management has become an important feature of EU projects. There is real recognition that when data is not reusable, it represents a substantial lost opportunity.
Often the tendency is to allocate only a small amount of budget, or to make data management an afterthought. A rule of thumb is that 10% of the budget should be dedicated to data management.
Without a data management plan that describes how you will structure the data and apply standards, the credibility of your plan suffers. It is especially important to include how you will sustain datasets after the project funding has ended.
8. Not involving stakeholders as partners
The desired mode of stakeholder engagement is to engage them as partners, not just as advisers. In other words, they do more than provide advice or review clinical protocols—they are part of the team.
Often the engagement of stakeholders is tokenistic at best. Reviewers see through this, and when we relegate stakeholders (such as patient representatives) to tokenistic input, we miss a big opportunity to get inspired and to benefit from different perspectives.
For example, in the imSAVAR project, patient stakeholder input uncovered a blind spot in preclinical toxicity testing—sex differences.
9. Imbalance in the budget
Particularly in Horizon Europe consortium projects, budgets need to be balanced in terms of distribution across work packages and across partners. If the budgets are put together without balance, the credibility of the work plan is diminished.
A balanced budget is one that stays within the expected range, is distributed across the work packages in proportion to effort, and ensures fairness across partners.
10. Confusing Gantt or timing chart
Gantt charts were not meant to be constrained to a single page. They are designed to depict dependencies and often need multiple pages to be clear.
Faced with this reality, the common move is to limit the information on the Gantt chart—only work package numbers, for example—or to make it overly simplistic, with every task stretching across the entire project.
I assume most reviewers realize this and don’t penalize a proposal for it, but it is clearly a missed opportunity. There is no better way to convince someone of the feasibility and clarity of your plan than a timing chart that communicates effectively.
Instead of following the strict rules of Gantt charts, design a timing chart optimized for communication. For example, end-to-start tasks do not need to be on the next row down. If you label the task bar itself, related tasks can run along the same row.
I have spent many long nights working to fit a big, detailed Gantt chart into a proposal while keeping the text readable. No more—I now take a communication-first approach to timing charts and try to ignore as many formalities of Gantt charts as possible.
Final Thoughts
EU funding can be a powerful flywheel for your research—each successful project generates momentum and resources for the next. Most importantly, a funded consortium project provides access to far greater research resources than the funding alone would allow.
The process all begins with positioning your research correctly.
➡️ If you’d like a deeper dive, download my free white paper on positioning your research for EU funding.