Finding Horizon Europe Partners: The Tools, the People, and an Expression-of-Interest Template

How consortia are actually formed

Most Horizon Europe money goes to collaborative projects, and most coordinators do not start from a blank page. The BRIDGE2HE guide to partner search, written for the National Contact Point network, puts it plainly: institutions that lead proposals usually already have partners and “just need to complete the consortium with concrete profiles”. It adds a finding from its analysis of consortium building in earlier Framework Programmes:

“participating in thematic brokerage events was the most successful way to incorporate in winning consortia source and that partner search were really helpful in completing very concrete missing profiles.”BRIDGE2HE, Guide to an adequate partner search

That shapes the strategy. If you want to lead, use your network for the core and search tools for the one or two missing profiles. If you want to join, go where coordinators look for those profiles, and arrive with an offer so specific that it matches a gap. Whether you should lead, join or walk away from a given consortium is a separate decision, covered in the Horizon Europe consortium survival guide.

Before you search: the one-page partner profile

Every channel below asks for the same information in a different format, so write it once. The BRIDGE2HE guide recommends five steps: contact details, your organisation, your experience, your project idea or offered contribution, and what you are looking for. Its practical advice is specific: use a personal email rather than an info@ address, name the organisation exactly as it appears under your PIC, say what makes you stand out instead of pasting a website link, use five keywords that are neither too general nor too narrow, name one or two topics rather than many, and do not rush to offer to coordinate if you are new. The template below follows those steps.

PARTNER PROFILE — [Organisation name as registered under your PIC] · PIC [9 digits] · [Country] · [Type: university / research organisation / SME / public body / NGO]

Contact: [Name], [role], [personal email, not info@], [phone]

Who we are (2 lines): [Department or unit], [size], [core expertise in 5 keywords, mixing general and specific terms].
What makes us stand out: [unique equipment, dataset, test site, user access or market position].

Track record (3 lines): [N] EU-funded projects, most relevant: [acronym, call ID, role] × 3.
[One flagship result or publication.] Website: [link at the end, not instead of a description].

Topic(s) of interest: HORIZON-[CLx]-20[yy]-[TOPIC-ID] (one or two, not ten)

What we offer (task level):
  • [Contribution 1, quantified: e.g. pilot deployment in 3 hospitals]
  • [Contribution 2, quantified: e.g. access to 1,200 end users, ethics approval in place]
  • [Contribution 3: e.g. dissemination through the national network we chair]
Role offered: [partner / work package leader]   (coordinate only once you know the process)

What we are looking for: [expertise sought, in detail] for [topic ID].
Expected contribution: [what the partner would do]. Search open until: [date].

The channels compared

Channel 1: the Funding and Tenders Portal partner search

The portal offers partner search in two places. The dedicated partner search tool lets you find organisations by keyword, programme, topic, country, city and organisation type. Each organisation’s profile shows its programmes and roles, its main collaboration partners, its project list and its partner search announcements, which makes it a quick way to see who has coordinated what. The second place is the topic page itself: every topic open to collaboration has a list of organisations that have posted an interest, filtered to that topic only.

To post, log in, open the topic page, go to the partner search announcements and click Add. You choose the profile you are posting for, choose between a request, to find partners for your idea, and an offer, to propose your expertise, and write a description of at most 500 characters. For an organisation, only its LEAR, account administrators or self-registrant can publish; users with an active public person profile can also post for themselves. The BRIDGE2HE guide adds two cautions: the tool is not moderated, so quality varies, and it is not for commercial use. To appear in searches at all, your organisation must be registered in the Participant Register.

OFFER for HORIZON-CL6-20yy-XXXX: Greek research organisation (PIC 9xxxxxxxx) offers WP lead on precision-irrigation field trials on 40 ha in Thessaly, a 600-node IoT sensor network, 3 seasons of yield data, and links to 2 regional farmer cooperatives (1,100 members). 2 Horizon Europe projects since 2022 (ACRONYM1, ACRONYM2). Seeking partner or WP role in a consortium. Contact: name@org.gr

Channel 2: CORDIS and the Horizon Dashboard

CORDIS is the public database of EU-funded research projects, and every project record lists its consortium. Search it with the keywords of your target topic and the equivalent topics of the previous work programme, and you get a list of organisations that have already won in that space, with the coordinators named. The Horizon Dashboard adds public statistics on participation, including by entity and country, which helps to spot the organisations in a given country that repeatedly take part. Both sources show you who to approach; neither contacts anyone for you. When you write, refer to their funded project and explain what your organisation adds to a follow-up.

Channel 3: the Enterprise Europe Network

The Enterprise Europe Network partnering database holds thousands of profiles, filterable by profile type, including research and development requests, by partner type such as SMEs, research institutions and universities, by partnership type, stage of development, technology and market keywords, and country. The BRIDGE2HE guide describes three features that set it apart from the portal: profiles are validated before publication and interactions are monitored by the local EEN office, local EEN staff will help you write a profile, and registered users can save searches for daily, weekly or monthly alerts. A research and development profile includes the call identifier, the type and role of partner sought, whether a coordinator is required, and a deadline for expressions of interest, which is exactly what a coordinator needs to decide quickly. It is the most useful channel for finding companies that can carry exploitation.

Channel 4: National Contact Points and thematic networks

Every country has National Contact Points for the parts of Horizon Europe, listed on the Funding and Tenders Portal. They give free advice, run information days in national languages, invite applicants to brokerage events and circulate partner requests through their European networks. Some thematic NCP networks run their own partner search; Ideal-ist, the Cluster 4 digital NCP network, operates a partner search hub for digital topics. Ask your NCP to add you to their mailing lists for your cluster. In Greece, the General Secretariat for Research and Innovation designates the NCPs: EKT, the National Documentation Centre, covers MSCA, the Health and Digital, Industry and Space clusters and the Cancer Mission, and PRAXI Network at FORTH covers 13 thematic areas. For the wider Greek funding landscape, see research funding in Greece.

Channel 5: brokerage and matchmaking events

Brokerage events are where the BRIDGE2HE analysis found winning consortia most often formed. They are usually attached to information days for a cluster or call, organised by NCP networks or EEN, and combine short pitches with bilateral meetings booked in advance through a matchmaking platform. Prepare a three-slide pitch from your profile: who you are, the concrete contribution you offer to named topics, and the gap you want filled. Book meetings with coordinators whose topics match, and send the expression of interest below within a couple of days, while the conversation is still fresh.

The expression-of-interest email

Whether a partner search, a CORDIS record or a brokerage meeting led you to a coordinator, the email that follows decides whether you are considered. Coordinators assembling a proposal receive many of these, and answer the ones that match a gap on the first read.

Subject: EoI HORIZON-[CLx]-20[yy]-[TOPIC-ID] — [Organisation] offers [one concrete asset] for [WP or task]

Dear [Dr / Prof. Surname],

I saw your partner search for [topic ID] on [the Funding & Tenders Portal / EEN / event name] on [date].
[Organisation] ([country], [type], PIC [xxxxxxxxx]) can cover the gap you listed: [quote their gap].

Concretely we would bring:
 1. [Asset or task 1, with a number: sites, users, datasets, TRL]
 2. [Asset or task 2]
 3. [Most relevant EU project: acronym, call, our role]

Our organisation is registered in the Participant Register with a validated PIC,
so we can be added to the proposal quickly.

One-page profile below; happy to join a 20-minute call ([two time slots]).

Kind regards,
[Name], [role]
[Organisation] · [phone] · [profile URL]

Six things that get an expression of interest ignored:

1. No topic ID, so the coordinator cannot tell which proposal you mean.
2. A generic organisation description instead of a task you would do.
3. No numbers: sites, users, datasets, person-months or technology readiness.
4. No PIC or country, so eligibility and balance cannot be checked.
5. Everything in an attachment and nothing in the body.
6. A copy of the same message sent under many topics, which the portal guide specifically warns against.

Once partners start sending text, the next problem is turning eight contributions in eight styles into one proposal. That is the step Consortium Merge is built for.

Being found: making your organisation visible

• Register and validate. Your organisation needs a PIC in the Participant Register and a validated LEAR before anyone can post for it.
• Complete the portal profile. The portal manual notes that adding keywords to the organisation profile makes it easier to find, and a good description makes your expertise clear.
• Post offers on specific topics. An offer under a named topic reaches the coordinators reading that topic page.
• Keep an EEN profile current if you want industrial partners to find you, and close searches that are no longer needed.
• Build a visible track record. Past projects on CORDIS and your portal profile are what coordinators check first.

Organisations in widening countries often face extra scepticism from coordinators; the evidence on that is discussed in geographic bias in grant review.

Vetting the partner you found

A partner who answers quickly is not necessarily a partner who delivers. Check their CORDIS history and portal profile, ask a previous coordinator for a reference, and run the due-diligence and red-flag checks in the consortium guide. Confirm country and role eligibility with the Horizon Europe consortium checker. If the call is a two-stage call, remember that the consortium can still change between stages, so a strong late contact is not necessarily too late. For doctoral training networks, where every beneficiary must recruit, the rules differ: see the MSCA Doctoral Networks guide.