Interim evaluation of Horizon Europe: EAIC's reply

​After over 15 months of experience with Horizon Europe for both individual and collaborative calls, EAIC, the European Association of Innovation Consultants can provide some constructive feed-back on the new Horizon Europe Programme and its application process which has slightly evolved since the previous Framework Programme H2020.
With a view to contributing to the European Commission’s current interim review of Horizon Europe programme, a synthesis of EAIC member recommendations is provided below.
Oversubscription and excellence:

• Although the overall success rate of Horizon Europe calls has increased vs H2020, a number of calls are too open and the expectations created are far above from the EC capacity to fund excellent projects, we urge the commission to consider restricting the focus of topics when the budget available is not expected to meet a large part of applicants' expectations, risking to demotivate new comers.  
• For actions receiving 15 points out 15 but not being funded due to a lack of allocated budget we strongly recommend the EC to use all regulatory means possible to facilitate the transfer of budget from unused part of the programme by setting up an automatic scheme enabling to fund such excellent projects. 

Collaborative Calls application process:

• Generally, the structure of the application process and the format of the answer for collaborative Horizon Europe calls (IAs, RIAs or CSAs) remains the same as in Horizon2020 which is perceived positively.  

• Improve instructions as regard the type of staff members can be included in the case of partners not having researcher staff or for non-technical partners, that could be included in projects. 
• Length of proposals: we recommend to allow a length of 70 pages for the part B when the budget of projects foreseen goes beyond 10 million euros. 
• We urge the commission and its agencies to review urgently the capacities of their IT infrastructure.  

EIC Accelerator: 

• The EIC Accelerator evaluation requires some further improvements, the GO / NO-GO process is potentially leading to some false negatives, we are suggesting several improvements to avoid such situations. 
• We believe the EIC should go back to its original mission of a European sovereign investment mechanism, as initially foreseen by the European Parliament and European Council. The European Commission should remain the single decision-maker with regards to EIC equity funding.

Professional management of funded actions:

• Allow the participation of other entities, not just the coordinator, in Project Management activities. 
• Allow the subcontracting of management tasks to professional experts with proven track records. 
• Improve the quality of project management by promoting good project management practices as developed in our reply

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