ERC is not a grant for "fishing expedition" research

ERC has a bottom-up approach which means it can fund virtually any topic of research. However, this does not mean that it is open to any type of research. With the highly competitive written and unwritten rules of ERC, some research types simply fall short of the ERC requirements for success. Many times we come across one specific type of research used by researchers for their ERC project. Due to its popularity, and characteristics, we’ve even termed this type of research and will refer to it throughout this post as “fishing expedition” research. Experience shows that this specific type of research project can struggle to present a highly competitive and winning ERC grant proposal. In this article, we will focus on better understanding the issues with ERC and a “fishing expedition” type of research. Following that, we will share some of our top tips for adjusting “fishing expedition” research to successfully match the ERC’s competitive criteria.