Learn the essential rules, requirements and terminology of the ERC grant. This course is ideal for beginners and serves as background for the "ERC Beyond" course. The objective and added value: In this course, we cover the essential rules, terminology and technical requirements of ERC. This includes information from the official documentation and EC resources: the ERC Work Program, ERC Guide for Applicants and the online submission system, as well as important tips based on our years of hands-on experience with thousands of ERC proposals. Therefore, this course is ideal for potential ERC applicants who are not yet familiar with this grant and would like to learn more about it. From experience, understanding ERC technicalities is a step that applicants tend to skip. However, by doing so they are missing crucial information which can directly affect the eligibility and competitiveness of the grant application. We know that reading all the official documents can be a tedious task - this is why we created this course to walk you through all these "boring" (yet essential) technicalities and clarify the less intuitive rules and policies. The topics of the course include: Introduction to ERC - Basic principles and what it is all about? Eligibility. The ERC PI's profile - benchmarks for competitiveness. The ERC project in a nutshell. The evaluation process and review panels. The ERC Interview. The Evaluation Summary Report. The ERC budget. The online submission system and online forms. The ERC application documents and annexes.

Learn the counterintuitive, elusive and conceptual parts of the ERC grant. Learn everything you need to know to write a competitive ERC application. The objective and added value: The "ERC Beyond" course conveys to participants information that is beyond the ERC official documents. From experience, we understand that what creates highly competitive applications is a firm grasp of the elusive and unwritten rules of this grant. For example, the sole evaluation criterion in ERC is "excellence", but many find this concept quite elusive. Indeed, it cannot be understood from simply reading the official documents. In this course we accelerate to the counterintuitive, elusive and conceptual parts of the ERC grant, deciphering "excellence", alongside additional unwritten and conceptual rules for success. The topics of this course include: The competitive PI profile - who is "ERC Material"? What constitutes the required Scientific Excellence? The unique nature of ERC: high-risk, high-gain, non-incremental work. Hypothesis for ERC - how to do it right. Selecting and presenting the scientific approach. Collaborations in ERC. Review panel selection and the panel-application reciprocal effect. Suggested ERC thinking process. And more...

Engage in an interactive, guided review of selected real ERC proposals. Get hands-on insights into what drives a competitive ERC application. This workshop is designed for ERC applicants and research managers who wish to gain a deeper understanding of what truly drives competitiveness through hands-on engagement with real ERC proposals. In this workshop, we reflect on how the core principles that govern "scientific excellence", as expected by the ERC, are expressed or challenged in written applications. This hands-on workshop includes discussion on participants' own proposal material in a small-group setting. During the session, the trainer will guide the discussion, demonstrating how the principles covered in the ERC Beyond course are reflected in each proposal, identifying strengths, areas for improvement, and key lessons. As always, Enspire Science maintains strict confidentiality and does not share proposals from previous or parallel engagements.