The dissemination, exploitation and communication plan in Horizon Europe
Most consortia write their dissemination, exploitation and communication plan as one thing: a list of conferences, a website, a Twitter account renamed to X. Evaluators read that list and see a team that has not thought about who will actually use the results. In a collaborative Horizon Europe proposal, a RIA or IA under Pillar 2, that impression is expensive.
This is section 2.2 of the Part B template, "Measures to maximise impact", and it sits inside the Impact criterion. It has two parts: the plan for dissemination, exploitation and communication activities (a synthesis plus a list of DEC tasks, each with a KPI), and the strategy for managing intellectual property and protecting results. Together they are the engine of the Impact section: the pathway you described there only becomes credible if this section shows how your key results reach the people who will adopt them.
Three different jobs, not one
The single most common failure in section 2.2 is treating dissemination, exploitation and communication as synonyms. They are three distinct jobs, with different audiences and different purposes.
Dissemination is about your results, aimed at the people who can use them: the scientific community, industry, policymakers. The channels follow from the audience: publications, workshops, conferences, standardisation bodies. The purpose is knowledge transfer, so that others can build on your results or apply them.
Exploitation is the concrete use of those results to create value. Commercial value is the obvious case (a product, a service, a licence), but exploitation also covers societal, policy and scientific value. The key question is who benefits and how, and the answer is not restricted to the industrial partners of the consortium. A public authority adopting a method is exploitation. A standard informed by your data is exploitation.
Communication is about the project itself and its results, aimed at a broad audience including the public and the media. It starts at the very beginning of the project, not at the end. A website, a demonstration event, a public workshop: these are not decoration, they build the awareness that makes uptake possible later. Good communication can also be two-way, engaging audiences rather than just broadcasting at them.
A quick test when you are unsure where an activity belongs: communication is about the project and speaks to everyone; dissemination is about the results and speaks to those who can use them; exploitation is the actual use and the value it creates. If your draft has three headings but the same content under each, you have written one plan three times, which is one of the typical mistakes in Horizon Europe proposals evaluators spot immediately.
Building the plan: audiences first, then tasks, then KPIs
What goes in the proposal is the first, draft version of the plan, and it carries more weight than most teams realise: this draft "plan for dissemination and exploitation including communication activities" is an admissibility condition, unless the topic says otherwise, so a proposal that leaves it out can be ruled inadmissible before it is ever scored. The detailed plan comes later, as a mandatory deliverable within six months of signing the grant, updated as the project runs. What evaluators judge in the proposal is whether this draft already shows real thought about audiences and uptake.
Start with the audiences. Map them with the Quadruple Helix: industry, academia, government, civil society. Then run a persona exercise with your partners, so the audiences become concrete people and organisations rather than the word "stakeholders" repeated eleven times. Each audience should connect back to the target groups your call's expected outcomes point to; if your dissemination targets do not match the groups the call names, the plan reads as generic.
Next, run an exploitation workshop with your partners. For each key result, work out who will use it and what value they get from it. This one meeting produces more usable content for section 2.2 than any amount of solo writing, because exploitation claims that partners have not agreed to tend to collapse under an evaluator's first question.
Then turn the plan into tasks, and give every DEC task a KPI. Balance quantitative indicators (publications, downloads, event attendees, website visitors, followers) with qualitative ones (feedback quality, expressions of interest, adoption signals). The qualitative indicators are harder to collect, and that is exactly why they impress: they show you understand that real uptake is more than traffic.
Size the numbers honestly. Benchmark your partners' existing reach: their current audiences, mailing lists and networks tell you what "500 workshop attendees" would actually require. Search CORDIS for your target stakeholders and for comparable projects, and calibrate against what they achieved. A KPI with no visible basis reads as invented, and an invented number damages the credibility of every real one around it.
Two habits carried over from Horizon 2020 still serve proposals well: give DEC activities a dedicated work package, and ideally a partner who owns it. And localise: use local languages where the audience needs them, adapt the selling points per audience, and pay attention to inclusivity and accessibility. A plan that speaks only English to a civil-society audience across six member states is a plan on paper only.
Intellectual property and key exploitable results
The second half of section 2.2 is the IP strategy, roughly half a page in the template. It answers two questions: how do the partners handle existing knowledge and IPR (for example patents brought into the project), and how will the project's results be protected. The guiding principle of the framework programme applies here: as open as possible, as closed as necessary.
Then comes the table of key exploitable results. Each key result gets a line: its owner, its intended protection (patent, open source, trade secret), and its route to uptake. There is no contradiction in mixing regimes; open-source software components and patented hardware can coexist in the same plan, provided each line says who owns what and how it reaches its users.
What a weak exploitation plan looks like to an evaluator
Both examples below come from real evaluated proposals, and both concern exploitation, because that is where the gap between intention and plan is widest.
Exploitation written as intention, not plan
Minor shortcoming
What the proposal wrote: "The consortium is committed to a clear and innovative path toward both open access and commercialising its innovations, ensuring long-term sustainability while maintaining a commitment to public benefit. In the medium term, we will execute a for-profit exploitation plan for the project's methods, tools and services."
What the evaluator saw: "The key exploitable results are listed, and responsible partners are named, but the exploitation plan is generic and lacks specificity. Routes to uptake such as licensing or spin-offs are not detailed, and IP management is described in broad terms. The plan assumes commercial viability without addressing market readiness or competition."
The fix: "committed to a clear path" is an intention, not a plan. Name, per key result, the route to uptake, the owner, the protection, and a credible case that someone will actually take it up. Commitment language costs words and earns nothing.
A route to market, but no market case
Minor shortcoming
What the proposal wrote (a line from the exploitation table): "Key result: [a hardware kit]. Post-project actions: further development, enhancement and optimisation. Target markets: several sectors and public authorities. Time to market: 2 to 3 years after project end."
What the evaluator saw: "The key exploitable results are identified with named partners and realistic uptake routes, and the IP strategy is outlined. However, the exploitation plan lacks specificity on revenue models (pricing, licensing terms) and does not demonstrate market demand or competitive positioning. The 2 to 3 year timeline is plausible but not substantiated with market analysis or pilot validation."
The fix: a target market and a time to market are a start, not an exploitation case. Add the revenue or uptake model, evidence of demand (a letter of intent, a willingness to pay, a pilot result), and how you stand against competitors. Note that this table did most things right and still drew a shortcoming: the bar is a case, not a list.
Why this section is expensive to get wrong
Section 2.2 is scored inside the Impact criterion, and for an Innovation Action that criterion carries a ranking weight of 1.5 at the panel stage. A shortcoming here does not just cost a fraction of a point; it costs a weighted fraction of a point in the criterion that decides ties. If you want to see exactly how those fractions add up, read how Horizon Europe proposals are scored.
The pattern across both examples above is the same: the structure was present, the substance was not. Evaluators no longer reward a section that merely contains a dissemination table, an exploitation table and a communication paragraph. They reward the consortium that can say, for each key result: this is who uses it, this is the value they get, this is how we reach them, and this is how we will know it worked.
→ Run a pre-submission evaluation with GrantForge: it scores your Measures to maximise impact the way a real evaluator does, while you still have time to fix it.
Part of our guide on how to write a winning Horizon Europe proposal. See also the Impact section, demystified.