In this week's episode of The Grant – the EU funding podcast, I’m joined by Eszter Ashlock-Kéthelyi, Laura Damiano and Miriam Boersema from the UMCG Grant Office to talk about a problem many universities know all too well: strong science, weak planning. Their starting point is simple but powerful: many researchers do excellent work and still miss funding, not because the science is poor, but because the strategy around funding is reactive, fragmented and too late. At UMCG, this led the grant office to move beyond one-to-one support and build a broader training approach – the Grant Navigator series – designed to help researchers understand the funding landscape, think in longer timelines and act more strategically.

What makes this episode especially useful is how concrete the UMCG team gets. They explain how they help researchers zoom out, define long-, mid- and short-term goals, look at their research story through an “x-ray” to identify the underlying building blocks of their work, and then group those into meaningful project sequences before matching them with grants. They also introduce a powerful distinction between must-have and nice-to-have grants, show why networking has to be part of funding strategy, and reflect on the challenge of scaling this work from individuals to departments and research lines. The result is a very practical conversation about how research support offices can move from reacting to calls to helping researchers build a real funding game plan.

Time codes:

01:57 Guest introduction and fly in

04:40 The recurring problem: strong science, weak planning

15:31 Why traditional funding guidance falls short

22:33 From need to solution: introducing strategy-building

39:56 Scaling up: from individuals to departments

49:32 Reflections and advice

55:15 The toughest challenge