The Horizon Europe framework programme for R&D funding is a bush with many flowers. I have troughout the last year built up content on particular Horizon Europe Pillar II which is focused on collaboration projects solving socio-economic challenges. Now it is time to have a look at one of the other flowers in the bush: The ERC programme for researchers.

The programme is THE most important funding programme for the research community broadly speaking. It has a quite different structure and characteristic than the Pillar II part of Horizon Europe. Focus is here to support the individual researchers with the in-depth investigation of their research area giving them the resources that all researchers per se is needing to go ever further into unveiling yet unknown revelations to advance European research in all corners. Added to this, the ERC is a bottom-up programme with no strategic calls.

I have never worked with this funding scheme so to get it right I invited in Yoram Bar-Zeev, Managing Director of Enspire Science, into the virtual podcast studio to give us all a thorough introduction to this fundamental funding source for the European research community.

In this first part we dig into the background and discourse of the funding scheme and Yoram runs through the technical elements of the funding schemes including call rounds, funding rate eligibility criteria etc.

In the second half we are digging deeply into the evaluation regime of the ERC programme and Yoram shares how you should approach the different implicit and explicit evaluation criteria. And of course Yoram gives us an overview of the main pitfalls that most stumble down in when preparing proposals for ERC.