Common use of Proposal Analysis Clause in Contracts

Proposal Analysis. This section presents a summary of the results extracted in [12]. The data re- sulting from the set of 242 ECHORD proposals (one full copy resubmission was excluded from the complete set of 243) involves a total of 509 proponents, 264 in- stitutions and 26 countries. The ECHORD core consortium lowered the entrance barrier by allowing single partner and single country proposals. The results pre- sented in Fig. 1 show that, even in small projects (typically 18 months and 300k€ ), single partner projects have worse quality than multi-partner propo- sals: 48.1% versus 25,5% (χ2(1) = 8.014; p = 0.005). In fact, the probability of a proposal with two or more partners to have a score above or equal to 10 is 2.717 times higher than in case of a single partner proposal (Odds-Ratio=2.717, IC95%[1.389;5.316]). In terms of international cooperation, the ratio of proponents that partici- pated in proposals whose evaluation score is above 10 with international coop- eration is similar to the ratio for single country proposals. From these values one might conclude that the common mandatory requirement of multi-country proposals for EU financing may indeed promote the participation from peripheral countries but does not have a direct influence on the quality of the proposals. From the analysis of the network of institution-level co-authorship, see Fig. 2, two conclusions were identified: (1) the clusters and the key players (with a (a) (b) Fig. 1: Distribution of proposals per number of partners (a) and proposals per number of countries (b) relevant number of connections or playing inter-cluster connections - labelled in Fig. 2) are organized geographically; (2) in addition to the major European robotics manufacturers (ABB, KUKA, REIS, COMAU, SCHUNK) there is a new group of key players that are small robot hardware suppliers with highly differentiating products coming from countries without significant tradition in this area, such as Spain, Austria and UK (Robotnik, FerRobotics, Shadow Robot Company).