In mid-’25 some changes were made to the page length of B1 and B2 for Starting, Consolidator and Advanced grants and they come as no surprise as the old page lengths were not helpful or necessary and meant that the system was clogged with work in B2 that was basically a repeat of what had been said in B1. And, of course, everyone wrote to the maximum, always…and 14 pages was very heavy-going for evaluators.

What we have now are two texts that are shorter overall and better separated and fit together to make a simpler ‘pitch’ with much less work for the reader – no less work for the writer, however, as B2 always seemed just to be B1 bundled with methods work and so what they are no asking for is that we don’t throw down B1 and add methods but just do them separately.

In fact, I think this change has been a long time coming – ten or more years ago I can recall lunches with ERC officials who told me then ‘please tell them (i.e., the researchers I was working with and training), Matt, to write five for B1 and seven for B2 as we are overwhelmed with material….etc…’ which I did at every opportunity and which the researchers took each and every opportunity to ignore such was the power of the idea of writing to the maximum.

So, anyway, that is something I won’t have to say any more as now the B2 is seven and is basically a project plan for how the objectives will be reached and what uncertainties we will need to take into account and B1 is the same old five.

But, there are some significant differences that we need to keep in mind. The two most important new problems for researchers that I found in the recent calls where the new model applied for the first time where as follows – I’ll put one from B1 and one from B2 below – there are some subtle other ones so please be in contact is you would like to take a look at this matter in a more general sense.

So, in B1 there is a new emphasis on strategy. Strategy has always been there, of course, and we have always had to explain the reasons why the objectives are the right ones given all the possible ones and why the methods selected are the necessary and sufficient set of work to reach the objectives etc. etc. But, it wasn’t called strategy in the documentation and now it is and so we have to force it into the foreground more and work it out completely in B1. It is a moderately complex and slippery idea that needs serious attention now but basically means how do we choose and justify our choices of what to do at both overall and focused project layers when we don’t know what to do. Of course, this should be exactly the position we find ourselves in in ERC as it is research and if it is research it is about uncertainty and so must, by definition, by an attempt to solve problems to which we don’t know the answers.

Of course, far too many proposals don’t pose questions or set out problems in any real sense at all but rather just hope to roll out work that is ongoing or answer ‘questions’ to which the answers are fairly obvious – and so they tend not to be able to set out strategy as strategy is about choice of direction and too often this has already been decided – these proposals tend to fail and will probably fail more (but not better…) in the slightly adjusted regime.

All to say, then, that the strategy section of the work will need to have new emphasis and for the first time recently researchers have been willing to work out why out of all the possible answers to questions or, in fact, out of the possible questions or problems these are the ones that matter and this is the work that needs to be proposed.

There is vast number of things that can be considered on this topic and it does add a new layer of complexity to the argument – but, once we get the hang of it it presents no problems, really, and it does add value to the argument as now core choices about the proposed work need to be set in high-relief without question whereas it was always tough to persuade anyone to do that always-necessary part of the work. Happy to chat through, of course, any matters arsing here.

And, in B2, the main thing that was confusing the researchers was the new emphasis on risk – as always, I am certain that it isn’t risk that we are dealing with as we are not insurance underwriters but that it is rather a form of uncertainty and is better thought about as uncertainty matched with utility at the other side of the equation.

It isn’t, of course, but tends always to be described as management contingencies that all projects need to be able to work out – staff, time, samples, questionnaire responses, travel to far-off lands and conflict zones, etc. as that is just the stuff that we have to deal with day-to-day and about which no one really cares and can’t be part of the sale.

No, what we are interested in are the assumptions built into the objectives, even the assumptions that allow us to set out the problems in the first place – the sometimes elaborate but often unstated substrate that allows us to build the proposal edifice but which might not actually be much of a foundation – that fairly complex and self-reflexive look at the lowers layers of the logic of the pitch is where we need to look to make a convincing case for ‘risk’. Of course, this is rather deeply tied up with strategy and objectives and the high-level choices that we make the for proposal and, so, does need to be very carefully considered and set out and, while it isn’t entirely new work, does now demand so new rigour and precision and the topic is newly in the foreground in the ‘template’.

So, while there might be fewer pages now, the work is perhaps marginally more complex and at least as time-consuming and demanding and, I am sure, will make the task of evaluation more manageable and fairer as these are a couple of core matters that researchers really do need to deal with but too often in the past didn’t.

Changes, then, but refinements really and useful ones that will push researchers to think and to really get ‘under the skin’ of their ideas of change.