Abstract

As Horizon Europe funding is extremely competitive, there are only a few co-operative efforts between organizations to support applicants. However, in some instruments, especially the bottom-up ones, interorganizational collaboration has much to gain. The downsides of a lack of collaboration are obvious: each organization needs to plan, build and run its own support process with substantial resources; a chance to learn from the successes and mistakes of another organization is lost. On the other hand, due to the element of competition, the contents of a successful support process are money worthy IPR that no one wants to see fall into the hands of a competing organization. This presentation will cover the pros and cons of an interorganizational MSCA PF 2022 pre-award support process, the contents of a fully virtual e-course for the applicants, and lastly the success of those applicants in the call.

The RMA personnel at two Finnish universities, University of Turku and University of Oulu, joined forces in early 2021 and agreed to design and run a joint e-course aimed at MSCA PF applicants at both universities. A 17-week long course included writing assignments for the applicants, instructional video clips, supporting documentation and webinars all aimed at producing the best possible proposals. In this presentation we introduce the e-course, discuss why and how the idea of a joint support process came to be, and take a look at some of the most common reasons for the reluctancy to engage in joint processes to support Horizon Europe applicants.

Once the MSCA PF 2022 call ended, we collected feedback from the applicants as well as from the RMA personnel supporting the proposal preparation in each organization. The feedback and our conclusions on it will be a part of our presentation providing insights on what should be developed and how to use the collaboration to further improve the joint support process.

The last part of the presentation concerns the evaluation results of the call and our insights on how they affect the future of this joint venture. We do realize that there is a substantial number of variables affecting the outcome of a research proposal and that RMA personnel has a chance to positively impact only a select few variables. However, the final scoring of the applicants (in addition to their feedback) gives some indication of the usefulness and value of the joint support process.

Learning outcomes: A new view into co-operation to gain Horizon Europe funding; ideas on how to build and run a fully virtual proposal preparation course; how to assess the usefulness of a collaboration and value of a support process to applicants.