The participating funding organisations should agree and commonly define the target groups and the call topics. Different methods can be helpful in reaching a consensus.
A common inventory of background material including EU policies, national or international strategies, or central scientific publications can be useful in developing a common agreement on the call scope and the envisaged projects. In addition, a systematic interaction with the community through stakeholder consultations could also play an essential role to identify needs an opportunities while avoiding overlaps.

Europan Partnerships will typically be guided by their strategic research and innovation agenda (SRIA), taking into consideration national or European priorities and global challenges. Depending on the underlying national funding schemes there could be a trade-off between a common scope and the number of funding programmes that can support it. The thematic scope will also affect the number of applications. A narrow focus will usually reduce the number of applications while a broader scope will attract larger numbers of submissions.