I start to have quite some research organisations that have passed through The Grant and it is always very interesting to dig into how they are working. It also means I can start to move into some more specific topics instead of a general conversation about how they work with EU funding.

One of my old colleagues from PNO now works for the French public research organisation INRAE. This organisation has chosen to develop sort of an internal grants consultancy unit. Not private in the sense that they are on the open market, but they are being ‘hired’, so to say, by some of the many many institutes under the INRAE umbrella.

I wanted to get an idea of how that set up works in all practicality and open up the window a little bit and get a peak view into one the largest R&D organisations in Europe.

I managed to get three nice INRAE people onboard to share to project’s idea way from the research lab to the consultant and towards project implementation. Yohan Lecuona, Louise Vaast and Karine Latouche share these insights with you all and me.

It became a long talk and there it has been divided into two episodes. In the first half we dig into the specific organisational structure of INRAE in relation to EU R&D funding acquisition and we go through, step-by-step, the path from the idea pops up in a research team and to the submission of a proposal….and eventual project implementation. In the second half the panel unfolds a concrete project as an example of the approach.

Time codes (part 1):

00:02.18 Introduction

00:08:15 Fly in INRAE

00:28:49 INRAE and INRAE Transfert SAS

00:51:43 The chain from lab to consultant

Time codes (part 2):

00:02.41 BATMODEL project – introduction

00:16: 54 Collaboration process building project

00:30:33 Proposal preparation process

00:42:52 Submission and beyond

00:45:23 Learnings and experience

00:51:53 The toughest challenge

Further help and links