We have been writing and winning projects for over 30 years and have been working on ERC since the very first call in 2007 in which time we have worked on thousands of ERC proposals and around 900 of those in real analytical detail – you’ll forgive us if we gave up counting  while back…

In that time we have worked on every kind of R&D and innovation project at national and international level as well as many other policy consulting and evaluation projects: this is long-standing and battle-hardened expertise which has been tried and tested in the private as well as the public sectors and we think we have a strong sense of how to win money in any competitive field – of course, our business depends exactly and only on that reputation for success.

We are an entirely client-centric company and work according to the rhythms and requirements of the researchers we partner with – each researcher is distinct and we treat each individual assignment without assumptions. We also know very well that everyone has rather a lot of experience in writing failed bids – we share your pain! we have written more bids that we can recall in all different circumstances and to fail is to waste vast amounts of resource

So confident are we that we know where each proposal needs to end up in order to win that we are perfectly happy and able to work along with individuals or teams in whatever way they prefer to develop their work.

This means we are happy to get involved in the development process at any stage whether this is in the idea clarification phase at the start or for final review late on in the process: in fact, typical assignments cover all parts of this development spectrum.

So, what do we actually do? well, the core of this part of our business is to turn good ideas into brilliant proposals that can win funding to solve research problems and open up new and fruitful lines of research to the benefit of all.

Why does this business exist? Brilliant ideas won’t sell themselves and average ideas from solid-enough researchers from institutions with a tradition of winning money will always beat great emergent ideas from researchers of the future.  And this explains why we have worked so much in ERC, in particular – we are dealing with really important ideas which need to see the light of day for the good of us all, ERC is a vital gatekeeper to future knowledge and great ideas fail mostly because of the flow of their arguments rather than the value of their science. So, that is why we do it still after all these years – to help make the foundations of future knowledge in Europe stronger by giving clearer voice to brilliant ideas. So,  you’ll find our emphasis is on demystifying the calls and on simplest possible processes to create bold arguments that cut through to the funders.

Oh, and apart from that, all the research ideas are fascinating and it is a joy to see new knowledge overcoming ignorance, and, anyway researchers are great colleagues to work with!…mostly…

Stats that put that in context a bit – we can all easily see that success rates in ERC and the FPs more generally are mostly very low – often around 10% and often trending downwards and it has been like that for many years. It might even get worse as researchers might be tempted to clog up the system even more by making proposals with AI… we are seeing this already on our desks and it is not pretty.

And there is an obvious agglomeration effect too at institutional level, the ‘Matthew Effect’ as it is sometimes called and last time we looked at that it was, in ERC, 50% of projects in 50 places – which feeds the sense that the game is rigged or that it is a lottery or, well, anything that we might like to believe. Our company was set up to break out of that cycle of pessimism and failure and demonstrate, as we have done countless times, that excellent proposals will win and excellent proposals can be constructed logically and systematically.

The simple fact is that anyone can win who is eligible and presents a brilliantly worked out proposal giving them what they are buying – so, strictest conformity to the letter and spirit of each call is a necessary starting point and we can’t win from any other position.

So, which problems do we solve? The main problems we solve at a general level are that researchers very often don’t really know what they need to do to win and this boils down to the general problem that funders and researchers are speaking two languages i.e., the languages of proposals on the one hand with problems and objectives and targeted work with clear ends in mind on the one hand and on the other researchers whose every day work expert-to-expert, colleague to colleague dealing with field specific issues that everyone ‘gets’ and which can be described mostly in exploratory or quite open-ended terms – this is a clash of language games or world views, in fact and the commonest struggle that we help researchers overcome in our collaborations.

And so, this is where we work most and make most difference – in setting clear objectives, in identifying and stating problems and ignorance in the field, in proving that the state-of-the-art won’t fix itself, in examining assumptions and dealing with the uncertainties associated with them and shouting as loud as we can about the fruitfulness of the new findings and evidence. Our work is targeted at refining and foregrounding these key aspects in all proposals which are the core of the funding pitch but which are not often the territory where researchers feel most comfortable and confident.

One tip? To guarantee that the proposal is competitive then above everything else, one thing will transform most of the proposals we see and that is simply to write backwards from the objectives – use your expertise to find strategically important problems and set out project objectives that are the answers to them and do that first and juggle those until we find something that will sell quickly. With the ends in place the proposal will be radically simpler to construct. It goes against the grain with almost all researchers, but, take up that challenge and the process will be as simple as it can be made. Please feel free to get in contact and we can show you in more detail how that is done quickly and effectively.