The ERC programme represents 17% of the overall Horizon 2020 budget (€ 13.1 billion of € 77 billion). Since its creation in year 2007, some 7,000 projects have been selected for funding from more than 65,000 applications all around Europe. ERC grantees have won prestigious prizes, including 6 Nobel Prizes, 4 Fields Medals, 5 Wolf Prize and more. Over 40,000 articles acknowledging ERC support in international, peer reviewed journals to the end of 2015. Each ERC grantee employs on average six team members, thus contributing to train a new generation of excellent researchers. By 2020 it is estimated that around 42,000 team members will be supported, offering cutting-edge research training for nearly 11,000 doctoral students and almost 16,000 postdoctoral researchers.

The fundamental activity of the ERC is to:

• fund “Frontier Research”
• provide attractive, long-term funding to support excellent investigators (PIs) and their research Teams
• encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding
• support investigator-driven frontier research across all fields

The ERC funds top scientists from anywhere in the world, who are based or willing to work in Europe in any public or private institutions, including universities, research organisations and undertakings, and encourages proposals:

• with a bottom up approach
• crossing traditional barriers among disciplines
• dealing with new and emerging sectors
• high-risk, high-gain
• ground-breaking

The sole criterion for selection is scientific and PI excellence 

ERC funding schemes, with its legibility rules, financial provisions and duration, can be summarises as follows:

We provide practical guidance to host institutions and PIs as how to submit winning proposals and manage ERC grants, in particular:

• CV checking and presentation of track record
• How to fill in Part B1 and B2 (the projects), from developing the 5 pages Synopsis to the full proposal of 15 pages
• Ethics issues: how to tackle them for ground-breaking discoveries?
• The evaluation process: how does it work, what to expect from the interview for StG, CoG and SyG
• Teams and Synergies versus Consortium
• How to construct the budget and how to manage the EC financial contribution, including financial and technical reporting
• The letter of commitment from the host