EU Research and Innovation Funding

EU research and innovation funding consulting, from Turin and across Europe. We take research and innovation projects through their whole life inside European and national funding frameworks: the decision about which instrument should carry the project, the design of the proposal and the consortium, and the part most people underestimate, which is running the thing once it has been won.

Where proposals are actually lost

Passing the evaluation does not get a project funded. In its own interim evaluation of Horizon Europe, the European Commission reports that independent experts rate more than half of all eligible proposals as high quality, and that fewer than a third of those high quality proposals could be funded with the budget available. Everything above the threshold goes onto a ranked list, and the money runs out part of the way down that list.

So roughly seven high quality proposals in ten are refused for arithmetic rather than for a defect. Their authors receive an evaluation summary report full of compliments and no grant, and most of them conclude that they wrote it badly. Usually they did not. They were standing in the wrong queue.

That is why this page opens on strategy instead of on writing. If the quality of the prose were the binding constraint, the sensible thing to sell you would be a writing service. The binding constraint is position: which instrument, which call, which role in the consortium, alongside which partners, and whether the project should be submitted at all in this cycle. We are not a proposal factory. We would rather agree a targeted strategy first and then write few proposals that are real.

What we do

European and national research and innovation funding, from the decision to the final report. Two people can do the same work and get different results depending on where they entered the process. We work on the whole arc: where the project belongs, how it is argued, who is in the room, and what happens for the years after the grant agreement is signed.

Funding strategy before the call, including the decision not to go

The first piece of work is deciding where a project belongs. European and national instruments do genuinely different jobs: collaborative research with a consortium, close to market innovation for a single company, infrastructure and capacity, regional programmes with their own smart specialisation priorities. The same idea can be strong in one and unfundable in another, and the difference is rarely visible from the call text alone. We map the project against the instruments that could actually carry it, work out which role suits the organisation, coordinator or partner or linked third party, and say plainly when the honest answer is to wait for the next work programme or to stop. A decision not to submit, taken in the first month, costs less than an evaluation summary report nine months later.

Proposal architecture, with the science staying yours

A proposal is an argument, not a document. The excellence has to land before the evaluator is tired, the impact section has to describe a chain of consequences that a stranger can check, and the work plan has to describe the same project as the budget. We build and hold that structure while your specialists fill it with the science, which is theirs and stays theirs. Where a call runs in two stages, the first stage is written to survive a different test from the full proposal, since it is scored on fewer criteria and against a higher bar, and treating it as a shorter version of the same text is a common and expensive mistake.

Consortium building and the shape of the partnership

Consortia fail on composition more often than on competence. Too many partners doing adjacent work, a missing end user, an industrial partner with no route to exploitation, a geographic balance assembled for appearances. We build the partner map from the work that has to be done rather than from the address book, negotiate roles and effort before the budget hardens, and write the governance in a way that will still function in year three, when the interesting part of the project is over and somebody has to chase a deliverable.

Grant preparation and the consortium agreement

Between the good news and the first payment sits a phase that decides more than most participants realise. The consortium agreement settles who owns the background, who owns the foreground, what access rights each partner gets and on what terms, and how the exploitation is shared. Get it wrong and the argument surfaces years later, when the results are worth something. We also check the funding architecture on the beneficiary side: aid intensity where a national or regional grant is involved, cumulation rules, and the prohibition on funding the same cost item twice.

Running the project once it has been won

This is the part the market underestimates, and it is where a reputation is built or lost. Work package coordination, deliverable quality, milestone tracking, amendments when reality diverges from the plan, partner management when one of them stops answering, periodic reporting that the project officer accepts the first time. We can hold the coordination directly or sit beside your project manager, and either way the objective is the same: a project that is defensible at review and that the partners would join again.

Financial reporting and audit readiness

Cost eligibility is decided by how the organisation records its work, not by how the final statement is written. Personnel costs and their supporting evidence, subcontracting declared as such, equipment depreciation, the treatment of costs that look eligible and are not. We set the recording discipline early, prepare the periodic financial statements, and get the file into a state where an audit is a formality rather than an event. The independent certification of the costs remains with the auditor, which is where it belongs.

The regulatory layers a funded project has to keep in line

Funded work increasingly sits on top of regulation, and the grant agreement is only one of the documents that has to be satisfied. Three layers come up constantly in our work. Artificial intelligence: the AI Act does not apply to systems developed and put into service for the sole purpose of scientific research and development, nor to research and development activity before a system is placed on the market, with testing in real world conditions carved out of that exemption. The interesting question in a funded project is therefore not whether you are compliant on day one, it is where in the project the exemption stops applying, and whether the consortium has planned for that moment. Medical devices: where the result is meant to become a device or an in vitro diagnostic, the Medical Device Regulation and the In Vitro Diagnostic Regulation shape the research design rather than following it, and the evidence you will need has to be generated inside the project rather than after it. State aid and intellectual property: aid intensity, cumulation and the background and foreground provisions of the consortium agreement decide who can commercialise what, and they are settled at the start whether anyone reads them or not.

What to do when the answer is no

A rejection above threshold is information, and it has a value that most applicants throw away. The evaluation summary report tells you which of the three criteria actually cost you the ranking, which is the difference between resubmitting and rebuilding. In a limited set of instruments a proposal that clears the thresholds and misses the budget receives a Seal of Excellence, and European cohesion rules expressly allow a regional or national programme to support it while relying on the evaluation already carried out at Union level rather than repeating it. That route is real and it is also narrower than it sounds: it exists only for certain calls, and whether it converts into money depends on whether your own region has opened a compatible measure, which many have not. Establishing which of these applies to a specific rejected proposal takes an afternoon, and it is worth the afternoon.

Who this is for

Digital health and life sciences. Where we are most at home. Clinical validation inside a research timeline, health data governance across partners in different member states, and results that are meant to become regulated products rather than papers. These projects carry a second and a third rulebook alongside the grant agreement, and the consortium that discovers this in the middle of the second reporting period loses time it does not have.

Deep tech SMEs and scale-ups. Companies with a technology that is genuinely ahead and no internal machinery for European funding. The risk here is a specific one: applying to the instrument that is most talked about rather than the one that fits the maturity of the technology and the shape of the company, and burning a year finding out.

Large companies with a research and innovation portfolio. Where the question is not a single proposal but a pipeline: which programmes to be present in, which consortia to join and which to lead, how much internal effort to commit, and how to keep the funded work connected to the roadmap the business is actually executing.

Research institutions, universities and technology transfer offices. Strong on the science, often stretched on the industrial and exploitation side of a proposal, which is precisely where the impact criterion is decided. We work on that half, and on the transfer arrangements that determine whether a result leaves the building.

Clusters, associations and consortia that need a coordinator. The partners agree in principle, the topic is right, and nobody in the room wants to carry the coordination. This is a role we take directly, and it is a different job from advising the people who take it.

Organisations that have just been turned down. With an evaluation summary report in hand and a decision to make about the next attempt. This is often the most productive first conversation, because the material is concrete and the diagnosis is quick.

How the work runs

The method does not change. The depth, the sequence and the point where you come in do.

01 · POSITION. We establish where the project belongs before anything is written: the instrument, the call, the role, the partners it would need, and the realistic assessment of whether this cycle is the right one. The output is a short document that names the target and the reasons, so that the people who have to commit budget and effort have something to argue with rather than an assurance.

02 · DESIGN. The consortium, the impact logic, the work plan and the budget, built as one object rather than four. Your specialists supply the science. We hold the architecture, run the internal reviews against the criteria the evaluators actually apply, and make sure the version that gets submitted is the version that was agreed.

03 · DELIVER. Grant preparation, the consortium agreement, then the running of the project: work packages, deliverables, partner management, amendments, periodic technical and financial reporting. This is the longest phase by a wide margin and the one that decides whether the next proposal from the same group is credible.

04 · CONTINUE. Exploitation of the results, the follow-on instrument, and the next application decided before the current project closes rather than after it. Organisations that treat funding as a series of separate attempts pay a setup cost every time. Organisations that treat it as a portfolio stop paying it.

Why OneSynergy

Twenty-four years on this side of the table. Funding has been Fulvio Domenico Marchetti’s backbone for twenty-four years, with more than 20 million euro in European and national funding designed, won and managed across FP7, Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe, EIT, Interreg, ESA and ERDF, as proposal architect, as coordinator and as project manager. The domains where that work has concentrated are digital health and life sciences, digital identity and trust, and technology transfer between universities and the public sector.

You are not hiring a firm. You are hiring people. OneSynergy is the professional brand of Fulvio Domenico Marchetti and a network of senior independent specialists, each working under their own name and their own professional identity. No pyramid, and no juniors learning European funding on your proposal.

The proposal and the delivery are the same conversation. Much of the market is split in two: consultants who write proposals and disappear at submission, and administrators who take over a project they had no part in shaping. Both halves suffer for it. A work plan written by someone who has never had to report against it tends to promise a shape of work that cannot be reported, and a project inherited cold takes months to become defensible. We do both, which is also why the proposals are more conservative and the projects are easier to run.

Regulation and funding in the same room. Projects break at the seam between the two, when a compliance answer contradicts a grant commitment or an ethics appraisal disagrees with a risk classification. The network works on both sides, and the European framework for artificial intelligence is a live part of that work rather than a subject we read about. Where a funded project has an AI component, the grant agreement, the ethics appraisal and the AI Act have to say the same thing, and somebody has to make them.

We tell you when not to apply. The incentive in this market runs the other way, because a consultant paid to write a proposal is paid whether or not the proposal was ever going to be funded. We would rather lose the assignment on the first call than spend nine months of your team’s effort on a submission that was mispositioned from the start.

Turin, working across Europe. Italian context where it matters, including the regional programmes that sit underneath the European ones and the national instruments that often fit better than people assume. European reach where the client operates in more than one member state, which in this work is most of the time.

How to engage the network

One conversation to start. No intake form and no onboarding sequence. You speak with Fulvio Domenico Marchetti, once, and describe the situation as it actually is, including the parts that are unresolved. That conversation is where the perimeter gets defined, and it costs nothing.

A second opinion on a proposal you have already written. The shortest way in. We read the draft the way an evaluator reads it, against the criteria and the thresholds that apply to that specific call, and tell you what is costing you ranking points and what is fine. It is a bounded piece of work with a deadline attached, and it is frequently how a longer relationship starts.

A continuing presence, when a single project is the wrong shape. Some organisations need a senior professional holding the funded portfolio over time rather than a closed assignment: watching the work programmes, deciding what to enter and what to skip, keeping the running projects reportable, and preparing the next application before the current one ends. Where the right answer is for the network to sit inside the project rather than beside it, it can also join the consortium as a partner and carry a work package from within.

The perimeter is built around you. This page deliberately does not list a package. An organisation preparing its first European proposal and one running eleven projects across four programmes need very different first months. What stays constant is the method: position, design, deliver, continue. What changes is the depth, the sequence and where you start.

Who actually turns up. Named senior professionals, selected for this specific problem, each working under their own name and their own professional identity. European funding work rarely fits inside one head: it usually needs someone holding the strategy and the argument, someone on the administrative and financial side, and real depth in the sector the project belongs to. The network composes that group for the assignment, from its own members and, where a competence is missing, from named specialists brought in for that engagement, and releases it afterwards.

What the arrangement looks like. You get a single point of contact. You know the names of the professionals who will do the work before it starts, not after the contract is signed. Each assignment runs under its own letter of engagement, so the perimeter is written down and can be changed deliberately rather than by drift. There is no agency margin layered on top of the professional fees, so the budget buys senior time instead of overhead.

The objection worth raising first. A network of independent professionals invites a fair question: who answers for the result. One name stays for the whole engagement. The commitment is written before the work starts. Each professional carries their own name and their own professional standing into your project. And the limit, said plainly: if your procurement requires a single contracting counterparty of a certain size, a specific insurance profile, or several hundred person-days against a fixed deadline, a structured firm is the better answer for that piece of work. We would rather tell you on the first call than three weeks into it.

Start the conversation

Bring us the messy version. A technology looking for the right instrument, a consortium that is half assembled, a project that has been won and is proving harder to run than expected, or an evaluation summary report you would like read properly.

Thirty minutes, no commitment, and no perimeter agreed in advance. You will leave the call with a view on where the project belongs and whether it is worth submitting. If the answer is that you do not need us, you will hear that too.

Talk to the Network

Where a funded project has an artificial intelligence component, this work runs alongside our EU AI Act readiness and AI governance practice. OneSynergy provides strategic, technical and operational support on European and national research and innovation funding. We do not provide legal advice, and we work alongside your legal counsel.