Abstract

At the end of 2020, just before the start of Horizon Europe, Ghent University restructured and expanded its EU Team. The aim was to increase i) the number of researchers involved in EU projects across disciplines, faculties, and clusters, ii) the success rate and iii) the number of researchers coordinating a project. Fourteen new colleagues were hired for both for pre- and post-award support. Nine account managers (1 for Pillar I; 6 for Pillar II; 2 for Pillar III) support the pre-award content including consortium forming, project development, and proposal writing and five project managers support the implementation and coordination of research projects.
Two years later now, we have compared the number of submitted and approved projects of all three pillars in HEU to the numbers of H2020 in order to assess the impact of the expansion. While we did not observe an increase in submitted proposals in all three pillars yet, we did see an increase in the success rates for Pillar II, where the biggest addition of support staff was. We observed that the success rate of partner (33%) and coordinator (40%) projects show a sharp increase in comparison to the Horizon 2020 average (18% and 14%).
Furthermore, we looked beyond the numbers and discovered other leverage effects resulting from our additional services. Giving more content-related advice and in-depth services, such as topic intelligence, project developing, and thematic lobbying allowed us to grow from a support office to an expertise centre, which has changed our collaboration with different research groups and departments. On the one hand researchers and business developers approach the EU Team more often to present on funding opportunities tailored to their needs, to discuss our insights on upcoming calls and concept ideas, and for earlier support in the proposal development. On the other hand the new EU Team is now in the position to take a more pro-active approach towards researchers with ideas and opportunities, and to develop training material and give in-depth training courses on grant writing for the different funding schemes. This way we are raising understanding within the research community of the purpose of different funding schemes and call topics. We are also enable the researchers to understand topics better, to follow up more closely on thematic EU policy, and therefore to write better proposals. Having the core expertise on EU funding together in one team, and collaborating closely daily, enables us to keep each other updated on new developments and share any new insights immediately.
We hope that with this support provided by the new EU Team, researchers are less intimidated by the lower success rate of Horizon Europe and the administrative burden, making it more likely for them to step up and take the coordinator role. Overall, the support provided at Ghent University by the new EU Team makes European funding more attractive within the university community, which should result in more European projects eventually. After two years our extended services for EU funding proved it: the more the merrier!