Sixty ERC grant holders receive top-up funding to explore the commercial or innovation potential of the results of their EU-funded frontier research. The selected innovative projects cover a variety of topics, ranging from new health therapies to regenerate nerves, to prototyping soft robotic system for industrial handling, to building a charity that will promote welfare and job quality of digital workers of so called "gig economy."
Proof of Concept grants, worth up to €150,000 each and open to ERC grant holders, can be used, for example, to establish intellectual property rights, investigate business opportunities or conduct technical validation. The grantees can apply for funding in one of the three rounds of the call. The results of the third round of the 2018 call were announced today.
The grantees are based in Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. Some 900 grantees have received Proof of Concept funding since 2011. Today's announcement concerns the third 2018 round, in which the ERC evaluated 173 applications. The budget for the whole 2018 competition has been € 24 million.
The next deadline to apply for ERC Proof of Concept grants is 22 January 2019.
List of the grantees by country of host institution
Background
The European Research Council, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premiere European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. Every year, it selects and funds the very best, creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects in Europe. The ERC also strives to attract top researchers from anywhere in the world to come to work in Europe. To date, the ERC has funded around 9,000 top researchers at various stages of their careers. It offers four core grant schemes: Starting, Consolidator, Advanced and Synergy Grants. The ERC is led by an independent governing body, the Scientific Council. The ERC President is Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon. The ERC has a budget of over €13 billion for the years 2014 to 2020, part of Horizon 2020, for which European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science Carlos Moedas is responsible.