We have a number of people who approach us each year for support during the writing process for their European research Council Starting grant proposal.
Being a small company with a policy that we undertake all work ourselves, we do review the readiness of applicants before agreeing to take on supporting them. But we also want to make sure that each applicant is prepared and ready to start on the journey of writing a competitive ERC proposal.
Here are some fundamental concepts that in our experience need to be met before an applicant can start writing an ERC proposal. Without these, the applicant will usually come up with issues, weaknesses and challenges that may be too hard to rectify once the proposal is written:
How robust is your hypothesis or research question?
- What is the scope of your proposal?
- What underpinning preliminary results do you have that demonstrate the feasibility of the proposal?
- What published track record do you have in the area of your proposed research?
- What is the leap that will occur at the end of the project that will allow the research to go beyond the state of the art?
- How will the planned research not simply be an extension of current or previous work?
- How do you plan to feasibly and concretely mitigate the risks whilst still have a high-gain project?
These above pointers of course do not simply apply to a Starting Grant, but also to any research grant that you are planning on applying for.
If you plan to submit an ERC research grant proposal, feel free to contact us to see how we can help you during your preparation.
