How to present a ‘team’ in the applications?

In the past few months, I’ve been involved in the evaluation of projects to the Green Deal pilot – EIC Accelerator and would like to share a few reflections about some aspects of this exciting professional engagement. Aspects, which are not a secret & could potentially be found in the official documents of the Horizont programme.

Part 1. The team

One of the areas which we always give a deeper glance is a team behind the project. And I realised that the multiplied criteria and evaluation areas, give indeed, deeper and quite precise insights into the projects and allow clearer judgment about their success chance. 

On the other hand, an experience of working with and cooperating with various business organisations supporting entrepreneurial development of teams or firms, e.g. incubators, accelerator programmes, or VC, gives me the impression that the ‘team’ might be quite difficult to evaluate. As a result, many managers or jury members must often rely on their gut feelings rather than on sharp criteria. 

How has it worked in the Green Dal pilot? As the EIC evaluators we use pretty precise and multiplied measures to the projects evaluations to make the process transparent and comparable on the large scale (thousands of applications..). 

It means for example that when we evaluate the teams, we first consider the team from the impact perspective and must judge 

• the alignment of the submitted proposal with the overall Applicant’s strategy and 
• the team commitment which is behind them. 

We also evaluate if the application includes 

• a demonstration of a need for commercial and management experience, including 
• understanding of the financial and organisational requirements for commercial exploitation and key third parties needed. 

The team is evaluated once again while judging the excellence by looking at 

• its technical/business experience, and
• management capacity to lead a growing team. 

And in case it’s relevant, an application should include 

• a plan to acquire missing competences with e.g. partnerships and/or subcontracting. The explanations of why and how they are selected belong also to the evaluation scope.   

Concluding, the preparation of an application to the EIC and to the Green Deal programme is and will be surely highly demanding and time consuming. Then if you want to make the best of your preparation time and increase the chances for success in a highly competitive process where the success rate is app. 5%, it’s worth making sure that EVERY single question got a response and it’s COMPREHENSIVE!