ERC Proof of Concept

About the ERC Proof of Concept

The ERC Proof of Concept grant is the only ERC scheme that does not fund research. It exists to answer a different question: does something that came out of an ERC project have a route to market or to public use, and what would it take to find out? The grant is a €150,000 lump sum over up to 18 months, and it is open only to researchers who hold a main ERC grant (Starting, Consolidator, Advanced or Synergy) or whose ERC project finished recently enough to still fall inside the window the annual Work Programme sets. There is no open competition for outsiders. Typical PoC work is a market study, a freedom-to-operate and IP analysis, a demonstrator or prototype, a first regulatory or clinical validation step, a scale-up test of a lab process, or the groundwork for a spin-off. What it cannot fund is more frontier research, and proposals that read as an extension of the parent project are the most common way to lose. Evaluation is single-step and remote: a dedicated panel of people with commercial, technology-transfer and industry backgrounds reads the proposal, and there is no interview and no scientific domain panel. That panel composition is the thing most applicants misjudge. The reviewers are not assessing whether the science is good, the parent ERC grant already settled that, they are assessing whether this specific 18-month plan moves the idea measurably closer to a user. Because the applicant pool is restricted to existing grantees, success rates sit far above the main ERC calls, and the call runs with several cut-off dates across the year rather than one annual deadline, so a missed cut-off costs months rather than a year. A grantee can hold more than one PoC, each addressing a different application angle of the same underlying research.

Who is eligible?

• •Must hold a main ERC grant (StG/CoG/AdG/SyG), or have held one that ended inside the window set by the year's Work Programme (recently ended projects stay eligible for a limited period after the end date)
• •The idea must come from the ERC-funded project, a demonstrable line back to a specific result, not a general research theme
• •Hosted at a legal entity in an EU Member State or a Horizon Europe associated country
• •The Principal Investigator of the parent ERC grant is the applicant, this is not delegable to a team member
• •The work must be translation, not further frontier research

How to apply

1. 1. Identify the specific result you are translating

   Name the finding, method or dataset from the parent ERC grant that this PoC builds on. Panels look for a traceable line from a concrete result to a concrete application. A proposal grounded in the project as a whole rather than one output reads as a research extension.

2. 2. Establish who the user is, before you write

   Talk to potential adopters, clinicians, industry contacts or a licensing office and write down what they told you. The strongest PoC proposals cite real conversations. The weakest describe a market in the abstract and never name a person who wants the thing.

3. 3. Involve your technology transfer office early

   Most hosts have a TTO that has run PoC projects before and knows the IP position of your parent grant. They will also handle the freedom-to-operate question, which is a standard PoC work package and one you do not want to discover late.

4. 4. Write the plan as milestones, not work packages

   The lump sum is paid against stated objectives rather than itemised cost categories, so the panel is reading whether your milestones are checkable. Each should have a result that is unambiguously reached or not reached by a given month.

5. 5. Submit to the next cut-off via the EU Funding & Tenders portal

   The call carries several cut-off dates per year. Submission is a single stage: proposal, budget justification and host details go in together and there is no follow-up full proposal.

6. 6. Remote panel evaluation, roughly four to five months

   A panel with commercial and technology-transfer expertise scores the proposal remotely. There is no interview and no rebuttal stage, so the written document carries the entire decision.

What sets winning proposals apart

• ✓Write for a reviewer who is not in your field. The panel is commercial and technology-transfer people, so jargon that a domain panel would reward is a barrier here.
• ✓Name the user. A proposal that says which company, hospital or agency would adopt this, and what they said when asked, outperforms one that describes a market size.
• ✓State plainly what would make you stop. Panels reward a PoC that includes a genuine go/no-go decision, because that is what de-risking means.
• ✓Keep the science in the background. One paragraph establishing the parent result is enough, the rest of the space belongs to the translation plan.
• ✓Use the several cut-offs to your advantage. A rejected proposal can be reworked against the reviewer comments and resubmitted within months, not years.

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