In my Timeline Series I have reached to the actual writing phase and start of course with the Excellence section. Even though I have written some Excellence sections myself this is not my core expertise and therefor I have invited one of my Advisory Board members onboard to make sure that I cover it right. Private consultant Marie Prouteau has 13 years of experience working with EU funding incl. EU R&D policies support, EU project implementation, EU R&D grants consultancy with strong capacities in especially proposal development and evaluation. She is also an EU project Expert Evaluator on Horizon Europe for the EU Commission.

This is a double episode where we in this first part go through the official Horizon Europe proposal template. The template is where it all starts and the EU Commission is giving quite detailed directions and instructions on what information is expected to be considered for funding. Together with the call text instructions this is what you are measured against from the evaluators side. However, the instructions can be complex to decipher especially if you haven't done this a lot.

Therefore, Marie and I go through the template, section by section, bit by bit, and explain the thoughts behind from the EU Commission and how you should percieve the different subsections and logic behind it. We also explain meaning behind some key funding language words that the EU Commission uses since it is important to understand before you start to write.

This is the second part of a double episode. In the first episode we go through how to approach sub-section by sub-section in the Excellence chapter including the crucial first page, the objectives, state-of-the-art through to layout and overall approach to the writing process.The episode is packed with tons of advice, tips, tricks, recommendations, "do's" and lots of "don't's" on how you can approach the writing of the section improving your chances significantly on getting the high scores from evaluators and getting the grant in the end.

Time codes:

00:02:40: The first page

00:08:50: Objectives

00:16:40: State-of-the-art

00:29:20: Methodology

00:34:20: Link with research activities

00:37:50: Interdisciplinary approach

00:41:00: Open science

00:45:50: Gender

00:50:10: Graphs and layout

00:54:30: Overall advices to the full proposal writing