Researchers across Europe have won grants from the European Research Council (ERC) for projects including exploring the limits of life on Mars and considering the inequalities in capitalist societies, as well as closer-to-market activities such as the development of a tablet PC-based application for detecting consciousness after coma in real-time and creating a web-based tool to make digital mapping more accessible to non-expert users.
In its sixth and last Advanced Grant competition under the EU's Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7), the ERC will provide individual grants of up to €3.5 million for basic research. Meanwhile, Proof of Concept grants worth up to €150,000 each will be given to existing ERC grantees with the aim of pushing EU-funded research towards commercialisation. This funding can cover aspects including securing intellectual property rights, investigating commercial and business opportunities or technical validation.
The last round of ERC Advanced Grants in FP7 is a good moment to take stock of the past seven years, said Helga Nowotny, ERC President. “Since the first funding rounds for outstanding talent, the ERC has grown remarkably and invigorated the entire research scene in Europe.”
Both schemes are proving increasingly popular, with 2,400 applications to the Advanced Grants call - an increase of 4.5 per cent, and Proof of Concept grants attracting more than double the level of interest – rising from 69 proposals in the 2012 call to 145 in 2013.
Funding frontier research
€660 million in Advanced Grants was awarded to 284 senior researchers, who will be working in eighteen different countries. Their research teams will include an estimated 1,200 postdocs and PhD students. In this call, the successful candidates are of 27 different nationalities, with the UK, Germany and France hosting the highest number of selected researchers. Women won just over thirteen per cent of the grants and the average age of researchers is 53 years.
Testing market potential
The Proof of Concept programme was launched by the ERC in March 2011, in an attempt to promote commercialisation of the basic research it funds. To date, the initiative has helped over 140 researchers to test the market potential of their ERC-funded research. The budget for the 2013 call is €10 million, of which nearly €5 million has been awarded in this first round. The funding is for up to one year per project. The second and final deadline of the Proof of Concept 2013 call for proposals is 3 October 2013.
ERC’s future
The ERC will continue its work with Horizon 2020, the new R&D Framework Programme starting in 2014, under which the ERC looks set to receive a 17 per cent of the €70.2 billion budget.
Receive the Funding Newswire each Tuesday, our Policy Bulletin each Thursday, and news about bridging Europe’s east-west innovation gap twice a month in The Widening. 
A unique international forum for public research organisations and companies to connect their external engagement with strategic interests around their R&D system.
