ERC reveals PoC winners
The European Research Council has announced 45 grant holders who will receive top-up funding to investigate commercial applications of their frontier research results.
The Proof of Concept (PoC) grants, worth up to €150,000, cover costs of activities to verify the innovation potential of ERC-backed projects. The PoC scheme is open to ERC grant holders only and the grants last for up to 18 months.
The 2015 PoC call is being completed in installments, with three deadlines for applications. In this first round, 45 researchers based in 13 countries are being funded and their projects cover a range of topics from improving the cultivation of medicinal plants, to building car engines using nanomaterials, to boosting turnout in elections by increasing the satisfaction of first time voters.
The total budget of the 2015 Proof of Concept competition is €20m, of which €6.7m is earmarked for this first round. Projects submitted in the second round of the call are now under evaluation and the results will be known later this year.
ERC grant holders can still apply for the third round of the call, which has a deadline on 1 October 2015. This is the first time that applicants can only submit their project proposals in one of the three rounds.
