Building up an EU funding approach from scratch in a research institute can seem like a monumental task. And it is. Especially if you are more or less one person to start it off. How do you attack that? How do you get the research teams involved? How do you secure some sort of results coming in not to late? And how do you build up the international and - not least – the Brussels network?

Stephanie Harfensteller, EU-Research Coordinator at the ICT research institute FIR an der RWTH Aachen, did exactly this. She had the idea to get the institute rolling with EU funding and the management agreed. She is a good old contact of mine and of course I had to invite her in to share this great story. Because great it is! After a decade the institute is now very comfortable in its work with EU R&D funding and the research teams are now reaping the fruits of sticking its neck out and investing resources in moving into this area.

This episode offers lots of insights and advice on how to work with EU funding in a research institute and not least on how to build it up.

Time codes:

00:03:08 Introduction

00:08:22 Fly in on FIR an der RWTH Aachen

00:12:35 Motivation for starting

00:22:40 How did you do it? Internally

00:45:39 How did you do it? Externally

01:13:20 Do's and don't's

01:15:22 The toughest challenge