Abstract

To be well prepared for EU funding calls, it’s best to look for months, even years, ahead. However, researchers are busy. This leads into a situation where relevant calls may be noticed at the last moment, if not at all. Then it’s already too late. How to overcome the challenge of preparing ahead?

Focusing on a recent coordinated proposal preparation case, we present the pre-award process through which we have facilitated a more systematic approach to applying Horizon Europe funding in the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute (FGI), a 150-person research unit of the National Land Survey of Finland (NLS). The work grounds on our service design -oriented development where we first identified target personas for pre-award support (Honkanen et al. EARMA 2019) and then outlined a postdoc researcher’s customer journey of applying EU funding (Honkanen et al. EARMA 2022).

By launching researcher-centered call identification workshops and regular follow-up meetings between the EU funding support and researchers to discuss interests and actions for proceeding with the identified calls, we have achieved several valuable outcomes:
1) We have raised researchers’ awareness on the available funding opportunities and increased their understanding on operation of the EU funding field,
2) We have increased the pool of potential applicants from “usual suspects” to less experienced rising stars and nurtured their motivation for applying for EU funding,
3) We have obtained organisation-wide awareness on our researchers’ Horizon Europe interests and actions taking place, by whom and when, and
4) The process has built ground for internal cooperation between the institute’s four departments and combatted unwanted internal competition through increasing internal organisation-level discussion on proposal preparation.

From the Research Support Office (RSO) perspective, the process has also:

5) Increased communication between EU funding support and researchers, and
6) Ultimately led us to develop intensive support for a coordinated Horizon Europe proposal.

When we started this pre-award process, no established model existed for supporting the preparation of a coordinated proposal. During the process, we have focused on enhancing understanding of the call and its requirements (i.e. call interpretation, identification of potential partners, and involvement of NCP), producing support material (e.g. a template for proposal writing), involving different internal support personnel (e.g. EU funding support, Project coordinators, Communication services, Information and Open Science services), and assisting in the proposal preparation (incl. overall administration of the proposal, instructing the consortium, and writing the proposal) all the way to the submission.

We present our case experiences from supporting a coordinated Horizon Europe proposal. The take-home message includes our lessons learned with do’s and don’ts on how to streamline our support process in the future collaborative applications.