Abstract

Pillar 2 in Horizon Europe is a top down programme, calling for specific projects tackling particular global or industrial challenges. The process to develop a proposal to target such Pillar 2 calls typically involves call topic analysis, concept development, consortium building, right up to budget construction and submission. Stakeholder analysis also features strongly as part of this process with a variety of frameworks available to aid in the gap analysis of the key players who have a “stake” in the consortium. The end user of the expected results, outcomes or those impacted by the project often form part of this group. However, they are rarely consulted as part of the pre-submission step and are only engaged with, if funded, during the running of the project to elicit their needs, participate in co-creation and co-design, user testing and evaluation.

In this poster we will describe how we integrated “scoping workshops”, essentially an initial requirements analysis step, working with potential end users of the proposed technology, as part of the concept development phase of the process. This helped immensely in gauging and understanding the real needs of the intended end users. Knowledge on the technical capabilities of the end users as well as the actual tools in use, the functionality offered, and their limitations was gathered. These insights contributed not only to increasing the level of detail provided in the proposal but also the credibility of what was proposed with real on the ground knowledge of the SToA of the sector that should benefit most from the project results and outputs. Visual prototypes of what future tools and technology could achieve were mocked up and further helped to inform, refine and redefine what was originally in the minds of the proposers.

Given an adequate time frame for proposal development, we see this as an extremely valuable additional step in the proposal development process. In our case, the proposal was successful. It received a full score in the evaluation and the scoping workshops/requirements analysis step were noted positively by the evaluators in the evaluation summary report stating “there is excellent engagement with relevant stakeholders”. We hope this topic will kick off some interesting discussion with our EARMA colleagues about the experiences and challenges others have faced engaging end users during proposal development and whether requirements analysis could form a greater part of the pre-award process when time allows.