Proposals become like little babies for the proposal coordinators. There is no end to the number of times guests on The Grant have referred to their submitted proposals and projects as their babies. However, many of these babies get rejected before they come to live. Rejections are an essential part of submitting EU proposals - whoever has been even the slightest involved in EU R&D funding proposals have received rejections. But it is for the proposal coordinator that the rejections can be a real mental challenge. And why is? That’s because the proposal coordinator often also is the one who develops the idea from scratch, involves key partners, make a solid effort to sell the idea and making it even stronger, deals with whatever challenges arise during the preparation of leaving partners, rough budget discussions, text developing issues and so on and so on. There is no end to how much a proposal developer invests of her or him self in this process which in the end results in a sort of symbiosis with the proposal.

All this of course means that when the Evaluation Summary Report arrives and the email text start out with the sentence: ‘Sorry to inform you that your project has not been granted funding’, it can hit hard.

My good old colleague from PNO - Elena Calzado Roldan, Innovation Management Expert in Smart Innovation Norway asked me if we could do an episode about the roughness of receiving these rejections for your little babies. We discuss why this is difficult and how to cope with it. Indeed this is an episode that should interest a lot of you out there.

Time codes:

00:02:30 Introduction

00:07:55 Fly in on rejections

00:13:13 The baby syndrome

00:23:00 The baby dies - Managing rejections

00:35:01 Organizational and personal impacts of rejections

00:55:17 CPI for baby?

01:18:30 The toughest challenge

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