The latest Cluster 6 call has made one thing clear: in Horizon Europe, excellence is no longer just an aspiration – it has become an increasingly difficult entry barrier. With success rates in many topics barely reaching 5%, competition is so fierce it prompts serious reflection on the sustainability of the system. The time, resources and talent invested in proposals that rarely receive funding is generating significant pressure within the research community.
In this call, Kveloce played an active and strategic role in three Cluster 6 proposals written by our team, in an extremely competitive context. The results confirm the strength of our approach: one of the proposals was successfully funded with a high score, and another is still under evaluation with real chances of advancing to the second stage.
Beyond the results, we carried out an in-depth analysis of the evaluations: trends, critical criteria, key differences between excellent and merely good proposals… An exercise that strengthens our grant writing strategy and allows us to offer more tailored support aligned with the real expectations of the programme.
Some key insights:
- Addressing the challenge is not enough — you must demonstrate how your proposal will deliver transformative impact aligned with EU political priorities.
- Impact is decisive. The highest-scoring proposals clearly articulate their added value, pathways to impact, and exploitation strategies.
- Internal coherence is essential — not only between objectives and methodology, but also between the consortium, expected results and implementation strategy.
- The consortium matters. A lot. Evaluators expect real complementarity between partners and clear governance to support the project’s ambition.
- Cross-cutting aspects (policy alignment, SSH, gender, open science…) must be integrated from the start, not added at the end. They must be measurable and embedded in the design.
Our evaluation analysis is further supported by our participation as beneficiaries in 11 additional proposals, with a strong focus on SSH (and in some cases, also on Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation). Among these, one has already been approved and another is progressing to the second stage — in both, the SSH approach was a key strength in the evaluation. These outcomes reinforce our working strategy and confirm the importance of consolidating SSH as a strategic pillar in the proposals we support.
In an increasingly competitive environment, a good idea is no longer enough: it is essential to transform it into a robust, ambitious proposal aligned with evaluation criteria and European impact expectations.
