Eligibility decides before the science is read

Eurostars rejects on seven administrative criteria before an assessor reaches your technology. Four of them catch people who deserved to pass.

A Eurostars application is assessed on impact, excellence and implementation — but only after it has survived seven eligibility criteria that have nothing to do with any of them. Eligibility is checked within a week of submission and can be reassessed later, and failing any single criterion removes the application regardless of how strong the project is. Four of the seven catch applicants who would otherwise have done well.

The first is arithmetic. SMEs from Eurostars countries must carry at least 50% of the project cost, excluding subcontracting, and no single participant or country may carry more than 70%. Both figures are explicitly not rounded, so 49.9% fails and 70.1% fails. These ratios are usually the last thing a consortium settles and the first thing that sinks it, because a late budget shift by one partner moves both numbers at once.

The second is independence. The consortium needs at least two entities that are independent of one another: neither controlling more than half of the other, and not under common control. A shared venture-capital investor or a shared public shareholder does not count as control, which surprises people in both directions — some assume they are disqualified when they are not, others assume a subsidiary pairing is fine when it is not.

The third is not on the official list at all, which is precisely why it is missed: at least one participant has to actually receive public funding. A consortium in which everyone self-finances cannot be approved, however elegant the project.

The fourth is procedural. Every partner needs a PIC number before anything can be submitted, and obtaining one takes time you have not budgeted if you start in the final fortnight. Submission itself is final: once filed on the Eureka platform, the application cannot be modified.

None of this is about the quality of your research. That is the point. The programme funds roughly one in five submitted proposals — far better odds than most European instruments — and it is worth not losing on the paperwork before the assessment begins.

From our practice · Eucade