In Horizon Europe and particularly in Pillar 2 (“Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness”) success ultimately rests on scientific excellence, but a solid consortium strengthens it by making implementation and impact credible. A good consortium reassures, inspires confidence, and sets out a clear pathway from research to demonstration and deployment. It must be grounded in a rigorous reading of the call text, translate the requirements for relevance and competitiveness, and tell a credible story in which every partner plays an essential and complementary role.
In this article, you will find at the end of each section Euronovia’s tips to help you draft a strong Section 3.2 ‘Capacity of participants and consortium as a whole’!
Ensuring partner alignment with the call
The first quality of a winning consortium is alignment with the call for proposals. Everything starts with deciphering the “Destination”, the “Scope”, and the “Expected Outcomes”, then translating these requirements into concrete skills needs. As a coordinator, you do not choose partners solely for their renown, but for the functions they will actually fulfil. Partners are selected to cover all the necessary building blocks, namely research and innovation, technological integration, access to data, test sites (or pilots), standardisation, exploitation, uptake by public policy, social sciences and humanities, ethics, data management, communication and dissemination.
💡Euronovia’s tips: Read the call carefully, sometimes specific conditions are listed. You must take these into account and shape your consortium accordingly. Pay attention to coherence, partners should not be included merely to meet the call’s requirements, each must have a genuine role and function within the consortium.
Prioritising complementarity over numbers
Complementarity is the second cornerstone. An effective consortium is neither minimalist nor bloated, it brings together enough actors to cover the value chain without multiplying duplicates. Universities and research centres, innovative SMEs, industry, public authorities, and NGOs form a coherent whole. Each brings distinctive expertise and assumes a role that helps the others progress. Responsibilities are clearly defined. This careful structuring, avoiding both gaps and redundancies, gives evaluators evidence of a collective that is capable of turning results into tangible impacts.
💡Euronovia’s tips: When drafting section 3.2, we recommend inserting a skills matrix to highlight the consortium’s complementarity. With a simple table, evaluators can grasp the consortium’s quality at a glance.
Seeking diversity of countries
Third, a good consortium is European. It demonstrates real cross-border added value, partners from several Member States and Associated Countries who together cover varied regulatory contexts, complementary markets, and interconnected innovation ecosystems. Being “European” is not about lining up flags, it is about designing multi-site use cases and demonstrators, aiming for interoperability and standardisation, and linking research, industry, and public authorities for deployment that can be replicated across the EU and beyond. Pay attention to geographical distribution, it is important to represent the whole of Europe, avoid focusing solely on, for example, Northern countries, and include a diversity of countries and, if possible, Widening countries.
💡Euronovia’s tips: We recommend adding a map to help evaluators visualise the geographical footprint of your consortium.
Governance of a European project, a revealing indicator of quality
Governance supports the entire endeavour by providing a clear framework without overburdening the project. It remains simple to foster responsiveness, robust to secure key decisions, and proportionate to the project’s size and potential risks. Clearly identified roles, a transparent decision-making process, an established risk-management strategy, and openness that strengthens trust between partners should all be in place. Avoid “window-dressing” partners by giving each participant real responsibilities, and ensure the coordination effort is neither underestimated nor spread too thin.
💡Euronovia’s tips: We always encourage consortia to highlight gender balance, promoting equity within the governance of a European project will be an obvious plus for evaluators.
In short, a good consortium is not the largest or the most prestigious, it is the one that sets out a clear trajectory from scientific excellence to operational credibility and real-world impact. It brings together complementary partners, flexible yet structured governance, and activities anchored in reality. This tangible promise of usefulness is what turns a solid idea into a winning proposal.