Writing a winning proposal

The pivotal element in your proposal is, of course, your conceptual novel research hypothesis.

Everything else in the proposal is there to put your novel research hypothesis in the right context and make it stand out as compelling and convincing as possible.

Start with an introduction that appeals to all readers, independent of their scientific background.You can do this by “translating” your research idea into an overarching problem, challenge or question which is intuitively important to solve or answer. Make it clear why it is important for human or environment to solve/answer specifically this problem/challenge/question.

This “translation” of your research idea is about providing concrete examples that people can relate to and visualise in their mind. One example could be translating “an idea on how to develop more energy-efficient electro-optic modulators” into a solution for how to reduce the huge electricity consumption in data centres – a problem everybody can relate to.

Provide concrete numbers, backed up by scientific papers, white papers, or reports, to illustrate how big the current problem is and, accordingly, how big the future potential is by solving this problem. It is absolutely fine that the envisaged impacts are long-term future impacts and not something to be achieved within the project period.

Present your conceptual novel research early in the proposal, often already in the summary, to catch the attention of the reader. However, be aware that the summary is often published if you get the grant, so make sure not to write anything here that you don´t want to go public.

Emphasise the elements of your idea that are fundamentally novel compared to what has been done by others in the closest, most advanced, and most competing approaches. Seek inspiration by reading published summaries from granted projects – some of them can be found here:

• ERC grants
• DFF grants
• Villum grants
• NNF grants
• NNF news
• DNRF grants
• DNRF Centers of Excellence

Think about what scientific concepts/terms are most central for your novel research idea and explain these to the reader.

In some paragraphs you may have to go deep into scientific details and cannot explain all new terms. This can be mitigated by providing step-wise logical argumentation, which appears more convincing, even if reader does not capture all details.

Backup all arguments by references, which is more convincing than just statements.

Often there are several possibilities on “how to frame your scientific idea” in the proposal writing – and this is essential!

By carefully selecting the previous research results you will compare your novel idea against, you have a big influence on how appealing and exciting your idea will stand out. Select few significant examples of the closest and most competing research results and explain these in concrete scientific details, to show that you really understand what these competitors did. This contrasts with long lists, where you only briefly mention results from competitors – an approach which is superficial and not very convincing.

If your research idea is related to, for example, increasing the energy efficiency of solar cells, you must state concrete numbers for the highest energy efficiencies achieved so far by others. You should explain in clear scientific details which approach they used to achieve these results. Focus your description of the competitors work on those elements that you will change in your approach, since you need these details for your argumentation why your approach is likely to lead to better results.

Describe competitor results that are as high impact and recent as possible to support that your research will also be of high impact. You may claim that there is no closely related research compared to your novel idea. This is very seldom the case, hence open your mind and think in a broader context. You must find the most relevant research to compare with, since without context it is impossible for the evaluator to understand the significance of your idea.

If possible, make parallels to previous big scientific leaps, pointing out similarities with your approach could serve as argumentation why you also expect a big scientific leap.

It is crucial that yout application is structured in a logical way, to help the reader relatively easily understand the proposal. Reviewers must read a lot of applications in little time and will have no time to jump back to re-read paragraphs. If a specific structure is requested in the call text, make sure you follow it. Pay attention to the evaluation criteria used by the evaluators and make it easy for the evaluator to see how your proposal addresses each of these evaluation criteria.

It is a good idea to highlight your conceptual novel research hypothesis and project aims from the beginning and hereby stress the main message. Repeating main points can also be a tool to make the key message stick – but make it balanced.

Please try to avoid abbreviations. If you absolutely need it, then select a few abbreviations that you clearly define from the beginning and use consistently throughout the proposal. But in general, write out the abbreviations so that the reader, whom you cannot expect to be familiar with your abbreviations, can immediately understand what you mean. As for abbreviations, don’t spray your applications with buzz words that can become more of an annoyance.

Make sure the important points stand out crystal clear and only hereafter go deeper into the scientific details that  may  not  be  understood  by  all  evaluators.  The  final  decision  is  often  taken  by  an evaluation  panel  consisting of scientists from a broad range of fields and certainly not being experts within specifically your field. However, during the evaluation process the panel may involve external peer-reviewers and therefore it is also important to provide enough scientific details to convince these evaluators.

One way to help the reader is by providing logical step-wise argumentation. By explicitly pointing out sub-messages to the reader, it becomes easier to understand. For example, do not just write that previously researchers used method 1 and I will now use method 2.

Explain explicitly what the limitations of the previous method was, what has changed since then which makes you suggest another method, what arguments do you have for this method being superior, and why are you the right researcher to introduce the use of this method.

Use figures to provide an overview, but don’t make them too complicated. Make sure that by having a quick glance at the figures, a clear take-home-message stands out.

In some cases, it is  good to outline the risks and challenges of your project and include risk mitigation plans. However,  consider it carefully and make  sure that what you write is logical and makes sense and does not appear as if you are just trying to write something.

Show that you take responsibility by writing in active sentences rather than passive sentences:

• Use “I” if it is an individual research proposal.
• Use “we” if it is a collaborative research proposal.
• Avoid using the more passive term “it”.

Don´t use abbreviations – spell them all out, except a maximum of 2-3 abbreviations that you may need throughout the proposal.

In your work plan describe well-defined individual projects for each PhD student as well as each postdoc, making it clear why you need each of these people in your project team.

References are a very important part of writing a competitive research proposal. Therefore, you should make it easy for the evaluator to judge whether you have provided recent publications as well as high-impact publications. It should also be easy to see which references have been authored by you; where you are first author, last author, corresponding author, or co-author. To achieve this, you could list the references as in the example below.

Provide a doi hyperlink for all publications.

• * = Corresponding author marked by star
• Journal IF = Journal Impact Factor 2019 from Clarivate Analytics
• Citations = number of citations from Web of Science or Google Scholar – be consistent and use only one of the sources
• Highly Cited Paper = top 1 % in citations by Web of Science

You can also embed references in the text as hyperlinks:

[Nature Energy 1, 16089 (2016)]

In, for example, a Villum Experiment proposal, this can save you some space.

Try to phrase everything you write as step-wise logical arguments rather than “just descriptions” and back up all your arguments by references. Make your argumentation as concrete as possible, since it is much more convincing if you explain in concrete details what you will do and how this is different from what others have done.

If you write that you will build a new theory, without having any hypothesis about the details of this new theory, it is not convincing. It is more convincing if you have a working hypothesis (research hypothesis) of what you expect this new theory to be in details e.g., a novel connection between food intake and gene expression mediated through a specific mechanistic pathway.

Help the reader to understand why your idea is conceptual novel and of significant importance. This you can only do through comparison with “current frontier knowledge in the research field”. Hence using comparisons, providing stepwise logical argumentation, being concrete, and backing up with references goes for all parts of your proposal.

• Argue why you want to solve specifically this problem by putting it in context for the reader and explain why this problem is specifically important.
• Argue why you will solve this problem the way you suggest, by comparing with how others have tried to solve this problem and how you have previously tried to solve this problem.
• Argue why you will use the scientific methods that you suggest, by considering what other methods could have been used and make concrete arguments why your choice is the best.

Don't expect the evaluator to see the significance of your idea or to know the relevant context and comparisons without you mentioning them. You must explain explicitly all take-home-messages for the evaluator.

Open-ended research

ERC projects must aim for significant breakthroughs that if achieved will serve as stepstone for further research. For Villum Experiments it is an advantage to aim for a highly risky idea, which if successful will open a platform of novel opportunities for further exploration.

Non-incremental compared to previous work

Avoid ideas that are incremental compared to your own previous work or competitors previous work.

Read more about non-incremental research.

Avoid “fishing expedition” project

In a “fishing expedition” you plan to “find the answer” by “going fishing” in large data sets, but you have no predefined idea of what the answer will be. To avoid this, it is important that you present a conceptual novel research hypothesis predicting what the answer will be and has this hypothesis as a driving force for your project. This is especially important for ERC proposals, but also increases the competitiveness of other types of research proposals.

Read more on why to avoid fishing expeditions.