Building a Horizon Europe consortium

Most Horizon Europe calls are collaborative: the funding goes to a group of organisations working together, not to a single applicant. A standard Research and Innovation Action requires at least three independent legal entities from three different EU Member States or Associated Countries, with at least one established in a Member State.

That minimum is a floor, not a target. In practice a competitive consortium covers the whole chain the call describes — research capability, industrial capability, and the people who will use the result.

Read the call topic and the expected outcomes before you list partners. The topic text tells you which disciplines, sectors, and end users the evaluators expect to see. Build the partner list backwards from those outcomes.

A consortium assembled from familiar contacts and then fitted to a topic reads that way in evaluation. One assembled from the topic reads as deliberate.

Coordinator — carries the administrative and reporting load, and needs the capacity to do it. Research partners — universities or research organisations that own the scientific work packages. Industry partners — the ones who make the result usable outside the project. End users or demonstration sites — who prove the result works in a real setting. Dissemination and exploitation — often a dedicated partner, and rarely an afterthought that scores well.

Geographic balance matters too. Spread across regions, including Widening countries where the call encourages it, is part of how proposals are read.

Before you commit, look for evidence rather than enthusiasm: previous participation in EU-funded projects, published outputs from those projects, the named people who would actually do the work, and whether the organisation has the financial and operational capacity for the budget share you are offering.

The CORDIS database and the EU Funding & Tenders Portal both make past participation checkable. A partner with no traceable track record is not disqualifying, but it does mean someone else in the consortium has to carry the risk.

Consortium building takes longer than proposal writing. Aim to have the core partners agreed three to four months before the deadline, so there is time to shape work packages together rather than distribute them.

Late additions are usually visible in the proposal: their work packages sit apart from the rest of the logic.