ERC awards 44 Proof of Concept grants
The European Research Council has announced the latest winners of its Proof of Concept (PoC) grant scheme.
A total of 44 grant holders will receive top-up funding worth €150,000 to explore the commercial or innovation potential of the results of their ERC-funded research. The PoC grants can be used, for example, to establish intellectual property rights, investigate business opportunities or conduct technical validation.
The winning projects cover a variety of topics – researchers will, for instance, build a multilingual database of EU law cases, develop a prosthesis to help people with hearing loss better recognise speech, and create a mobile app to reduce the level of aggression amongst individuals with chronic anger management problems.
The budget of the overall 2015 PoC competition is €20m; the scheme is open to ERC grant holders only and grantees could apply for funding in three rounds of the call.
A total of €6.6m was earmarked for this second round, to which 107 ERC grant holders applied. Proposals submitted in the third round of the competition (136 applications) are now under evaluation, with the results due to be announced early next year.
The latest results can be read
