A Horizon Europe proposal example, annotated the way an evaluator reads it
If you go looking for a funded Horizon Europe proposal to learn from, you will not find one. Funded proposals are confidential and never published, so there is no public library of winning examples. What circulates instead is templates and fragments with no evaluation attached. A template is useful, and we walk through the Part B template, section by section elsewhere in this guide, but a template only shows you the empty boxes. It cannot show you how the boxes get filled, or where a well-filled box still leaks points.
National contact points publish something close, the annotated template: the same empty form with guidance notes in the margin. It is genuinely useful, and worth reading, but it annotates the blank form, not a real proposal. It tells you what each box is for, never how a real answer in that box reads to the expert scoring it.
The honest alternative is one real proposal, anonymised, read the way an evaluator reads it. That is this page. It belongs to our guide on how to write a winning Horizon Europe proposal.
The example is a real collaborative Innovation Action (IA) Part B from Pillar 2. To protect the applicant, the domain and the identifying figures have been changed, while the evaluator's own wording is kept verbatim. Picture an industrial decision-support project, predictive quality control for a manufacturing sector, carried by a large multi-country consortium. It scored Excellence 2.5, Impact 3.5 and Implementation 3.5, for an overall score of 9.5. It therefore failed twice: Excellence fell below the criterion threshold of 3, and the total fell below the overall threshold of 10. (If thresholds are new to you, start with how Horizon Europe proposals are scored.)
One thing before we begin: this is not a strawman. It is a competent, well-written proposal from a serious consortium, and it still missed. That is exactly why it is worth reading. The faults that sank it are the kind that are invisible from inside the writing team, which is what the annotations below are for.
What this proposal got right
An honest annotated example has to start with the strengths, because the lesson only lands if you accept that this was a good proposal.
Its objectives were largely SMART, each with a real target and a baseline: a prediction-error target expressed as a percentage reduction against a stated baseline, a response-time target, and an adoption target in the hundreds of sites. Evaluators flag vague objectives constantly. This proposal gave them nothing to flag there.
Its Impact section explicitly mapped the project's own outputs to the call's expected outcomes. That is a genuine strength, it is the single most common omission in the Impact section, and it is why Impact cleared the threshold at 3.5.
Its dissemination plan was audience-differentiated and built on the partners' existing networks rather than generic channels. And its work plan was coherent, with deliverables and milestones carrying clear acceptance criteria.
Strong structure, a strong Impact case, disciplined writing. And it still failed on Excellence. Hold that thought through the four excerpts that follow.
Four annotated excerpts, in the order an evaluator met them
1. Methodology: complete on the surface, hollow at the core
Significant weakness
What the proposal wrote (anonymised and adapted):
"The methodological approach can be visualised as a continuous cycle of four main blocks. (i) Data acquisition gathers historical records, in-line monitoring at pilot sites, sensor-stream data, and external open datasets. (ii) Modelling uses machine-learning algorithms and state-of-the-art domain models. (iii) Assessment and operator uptake, where results are integrated by operators during the project. (iv) A decision-support system and recommendations, delivered through an interactive platform and a mobile application. The key benefit is that operator uptake occurs within the project, so the methodological loop runs at least once."
Read cold, this looks fine. Four clean blocks, a closed loop, stakeholders inside the project rather than at the end. Now read the evaluator's notes. The methodology is "descriptively complete but omits critical elements required for the domain and the call scope". The central concept was "asserted but not operationalised". And the proposal "conflates monitoring (data collection) with the research activity itself, failing to demonstrate how the project will advance understanding beyond observational data collection."
In plain terms: the one analysis at the scientific core of the call never appears by name, and no wiring shows how its output feeds the models. Four blocks that read complete, and the thing the call was actually asking for is not in any of them. This alone put Excellence at 2.5, below the threshold.
2. State of the art and novelty: asserted, not demonstrated
Minor shortcoming
What the proposal wrote (anonymised):
"The project aims to create a comprehensive decision-support system by strategically integrating multiple cutting-edge technologies, advancing the technology from TRL 4 to a validated TRL 6, creating a far more powerful solution than its individual components."
The evaluator's note: the claimed breakthroughs "remain largely conceptual. The advancement over the state of the art is asserted rather than demonstrated with concrete technical differentiators," with no measurable gap named against the closest existing systems.
Notice the pattern repeating from excerpt 1. The proposal states that something will be more powerful. It does not show, against a named comparison point, in what dimension and by how much. Integration of components is a plan, not a novelty claim, until the differentiator is made concrete.
3. Consortium expertise: the same hole, a second time
Significant weakness
What the proposal wrote (anonymised):
"The project is powered by a robust, multi-country consortium. This diverse group synergises expertise across three key pillars: advanced technology development, industrial deployment, and techno-economic analysis."
The evaluator's note: "The consortium lacks demonstrated expertise in [the one sub-discipline the project's central claim depended on]. No partner is named as having prior work in [that specific method], despite this being a core innovation claim."
This is the same missing competence as the methodology gap in excerpt 1, now costing points on a second criterion, Implementation. And evaluators are allowed to score it on both, because it is a genuinely separate failure on each: whether the method is sound is an Excellence question, and whether this consortium can deliver it is an Implementation question. One unnamed competence, two criteria bleeding points, and at no stage does the proposal itself announce the hole.
4. The effort table: priorities that contradict the ambition
Minor shortcoming
The effort table spread several hundred person-months across nine work packages. Validation and piloting each drew materially more effort than the work package building the predictive models at the analytical core of the project. The evaluator called the allocation "globally proportional" but noted that the core work package "receives less than field validation or piloting. This under-resourcing is concerning given its technical ambition," and no rationale was given.
The panel reads the effort table as a statement of priorities. Here it quietly contradicted the ambition stated everywhere else in the document: the analytical core that the whole project claims to stand on received less effort than the activities that merely test it.
These four patterns are not unique to this proposal. They recur, in recognisable forms, across submissions; we catalogue them in typical mistakes in Horizon Europe proposals.
Before and after: turning a described method into an operationalised one
Take the weakness that broke the floor, the methodology in excerpt 1. The "before" is the four-block cycle quoted above: data comes in, models run, stakeholders take up results, a platform delivers recommendations. The evaluator's verdict: "descriptively complete but omits critical elements required for the domain and the call scope", and "asserted but not operationalised".
Here is the shape of a version that would score. We cannot fill in the project's specifics without breaking anonymity, so the brackets are the slots you fill with your own:
"[The specific analysis the call's science requires] is produced by [the named technique], run at the pilot sites on a stated sampling design. Its output, [the specific variable], is fed into the modelling block as an input constraint, where it changes the model's predictions rather than sitting alongside the other data. This is what moves the project beyond monitoring: [the central research question] is answered by [that analysis], not by the data-collection network. [The partner], which has published work on [the method], leads this activity."
Why does the "after" score where the "before" did not? Four reasons, each answering one of the evaluator's comments. It names the required analysis, so nothing central is left implicit. It wires that analysis's output into the models as a constraint that changes predictions, so the reader can see the mechanism rather than trust an assertion. It states what new understanding the project produces beyond data collection, which dissolves the monitoring-versus-research conflation. And it gives the competence a named owner with a published track record, which also closes the consortium hole from excerpt 3 in the same paragraph.
Read the two versions again. Nothing about the writing quality changed. The sentences are no more elegant, the vocabulary no richer. The substance changed: named analysis, wired output, stated advance, accountable owner. That is the whole difference between 2.5 and a fundable Excellence score, and it is a difference of content, not of style.
What to take away
A template shows you where the methodology section goes. This example shows you how a methodology section can be well organised, fluently written, structurally complete, and still score 2.5, because the one thing the call was really asking for was described around rather than operationalised.
The deeper lesson is how one gap propagates. The scientific core of this project was left unnamed in the methodology, had no named owner in the consortium, and received less effort than validation or piloting in the work plan. Three sections, three criteria touched, one root cause. Evaluators do not need to confer to find it three times; each reading surfaces it independently.
If you want a quick test of your own text, try it now:
And when the full draft exists, read it the way this proposal was read, before an evaluator does it for you.
Run a pre-submission evaluation in GrantForge
Part of our guide on how to write a winning Horizon Europe proposal. See also the Part B template, section by section.