The art of the consortium: how a Ukrainian organisation becomes an indispensable partner in Horizon Europe and Interreg grants

The Department of Electronics at Lviv Polytechnic National University coordinates the Horizon Europe project HELIOS on white-emitting organic lighting systems together with partners from Europe. They didn’t join someone else’s consortium – they led it. The grant runs to several million euros. This isn’t an exceptional story.  But getting there requires understanding one fundamental point: you don’t win a large Horizon Europe or Interreg grant alone. And it`s the art of the consortium. The minimum requirement is three organisations from three different countries. In practice, competitive applications assemble 8–12 partners. And every one of them had to negotiate their way in.

This article “The art of the consortium” is about how a Ukrainian organisation finds a consortium leader, convinces them to include you specifically, and what to bring to the table in 2026.

Why consortium leaders are looking for partners in Ukraine (The art of the consortium)

Start with what a coordinator is actually thinking when assembling a consortium. They’re not looking for “the best university in the region.” They’re looking for something specific: data that only you have; expertise that would take years to build internally; geographic coverage they’re missing.

There’s also a purely mechanical reason. Many Horizon Europe programmes require at least half the partners to come from Inclusiveness Target Countries (ITC) – countries with lower research intensity. Ukraine is on that list. For a coordinator in the Netherlands or Sweden, your participation is more than welcome: it closes a formal requirement they’d otherwise scramble to fill at the last moment.

That’s how you get into consortia. Not through connections, but because you were found – or because you were visible exactly when someone needed you.

Where to look – and where to be found

There’s the official tool – and then there’s how people actually find partners.

F&T Portal Partner Search (ec.europa.eu) is the official register where organisations post partner search notices for specific calls. There’s a filter by country, organisation type, and topic. The key is not just reading other people’s notices – post your own. It takes 15 minutes, and coordinators across Europe will see your profile.

CORDIS (cordis.europa.eu) holds every completed and active EU project. The logic is simple: if a Berlin institute won Horizon Europe in a topic close to yours, they know how to build consortia. Find their Grant Manager and write to them. Don’t wait for them to find you.

Enterprise Europe Network (EEN) operates in Ukraine through BITE and several regional organisations. EEN organises brokerage events ahead of major calls: in one day you can run 8–12 meetings with potential partners in 20-minute slots.

LinkedIn – and yes, seriously. Searching for “Horizon Europe Project Manager” or “Research Grant Coordinator” at a specific institution gives you direct access to the person responsible for partnerships. A personalised message with a specific 3-sentence pitch gets opened far more often than a letter sent to the institution’s general address.

Field conferences. The researchers at Lviv Polytechnic who now coordinate HELIOS met their future partners at an IEEE conference on organic electronics. Consortia are assembled where people talk about science – not where they talk about grants.

The Pitch Note: one page that decides everything

When you write to a potential coordinator for the first time, they won’t read your website. They look at one thing: does your participation solve their problem. A Pitch Note is a one-A4 document that answers exactly that question.

There’s no official template. But in practice a structure has emerged that works.

Organisation profile. Type (university, NGO, company), number of researchers in the relevant field, Horizon Europe status. One sentence: “We are an eligible institution under Ukraine’s Horizon Europe association agreement of 2022.”

Track record. Not a list of awards. Specifically: “2023–2025 – consortium partner in LASER-PRO (GA 101186838), responsible for optical profile development and field-condition testing.” If you don’t have EU project wins yet, list publications in indexed journals, patents, or industry contracts.

What you bring to this specific call. This is the most important part. Not “we have experience in medicine,” but “we hold a dataset of 14,000 patients with combat-related musculoskeletal injuries – it is unique in Central and Eastern Europe.”

What budget you expect. Yes, people ask this directly. A typical partner share in Horizon Europe: €100,000–€500,000 depending on workload. The coordinator allocates the budget while still writing the application.

Contact person. Name, title, email, LinkedIn. Not “the international projects department.”

The entire document is in English. No opening lines about “We would be delighted to…” The first sentence is already specific.

What Ukraine brings to the table in 2026 (The art of the consortium)

Coordinators in Austria or Denmark don’t take partners “to fill a slot.” They need a concrete advantage. In 2026, Ukraine has one – in several forms simultaneously.

Datasets that exist nowhere else. Medical data from combat injuries, real-time population displacement records, critical infrastructure performance data under attacks – this is material impossible to replicate in controlled laboratory conditions. For research teams in medicine, urban planning, cybersecurity, and energy, Ukrainian partners provide access to data that no other EU country holds.

A live laboratory for extreme conditions. Drones in urban environments, communications under power outages, disaster medicine, decentralised city management under load – Ukraine solves these problems in real time, not in simulators. For research groups writing applications in resilience and crisis management, a Ukrainian partner turns theory into an applied case. This raises the Impact Score of the proposal.

Speed. One of the recurring problems in large consortia is bureaucracy: approvals across five institutions, three signature levels, a procurement process for every purchase. Ukrainian universities and NGOs move significantly faster. This isn’t a stereotype – it’s documented by everyone who has compared delivery timelines in mixed consortia.

EU accession context. Any project involving a Ukrainian institution gains extra relevance in the eyes of European Commission evaluators – not because evaluators are biased, but because the ERA programme and Horizon Europe explicitly state that integrating Ukrainian science into ERA is a priority.

What to do when a coordinator replies “your profile interests us”

This isn’t the finish line. It’s the start of negotiations.

After the first contact, the coordinator usually shares a project concept or draft call analysis – briefly, what they plan to write. Your task is to show exactly where your component fits into the structure. The more specific you are, the faster you move from “potential partner” to “confirmed Work Package leader.”

At this stage, you sign a Letter of Intent (LOI) or Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). It’s an informal document, but it locks your position in the consortium. Without it, you can be replaced by another partner at any moment – this happens.

In parallel, start preparing Administrative Data: your organisation’s identification codes (PIC in the F&T Portal), financial documents, status confirmations. Coordinators have zero tolerance for waiting on these items the week before the deadline.

Interreg NEXT: a lower entry point, with a specific geography (The art of the consortium)

If Horizon Europe still feels out of reach, there’s Interreg NEXT. This is a cross-border cooperation programme where project budgets typically run €500,000–€2,000,000, consortium requirements are lighter, and applications are considerably shorter.

Four programmes currently cover Ukraine. Interreg NEXT Romania–Ukraine focuses on cross-border development: tourism, water management, education, cultural heritage. Hungary–Slovakia–Romania–Ukraine covers the border regions of Zakarpattia and Odesa oblasts. Interreg NEXT Black Sea Basin extends to broader cooperation across the Black Sea region. Poland–Ukraine is a separate stream currently reorganising following the suspension of the Belarusian component.

The key difference from Horizon: Interreg NEXT requires a partner from a neighbouring country, but not a large multinational consortium. Two organisations – one Ukrainian, one Romanian – already constitute an eligible partnership. This is a realistic path for regional universities, think tanks, and civil society organisations that haven’t yet navigated EU grant bureaucracy.

Interreg applications are submitted jointly. So you still need a Pitch Note and prior contact with a partner. But the scale is far more manageable.

Practical checklist: what to prepare before first contact (The art of the consortium)