A mixed funding mode pools national/regional budgets and EU co-funding to support the transnational projects selected in a call.
The involved funding organisations use part of the total EU financial contribution as top-up funding to fund the selected projects.
The Partnership consortium must agree on a way how exactly to share the EU co-funding. Details should be clearly described in the Consortium Agreement. A model Consortium Agreement for co-funded Partnerships is available.
The EU financial contribution for transnational projects should be used in the most efficient way possible. This typically means compensating cases where participating funding organisations have exhausted their budget at different points in the ranking list.
It is thus recommended that funding organisations agree that they will not insist on equal shares of the EU top-up funding.
While a part of the EU financial contribution will be used to increase national/regional budgets proportionally another part of the EU financial contribution will be reserved for financial balancing purposes, so called “gap filling”.
From past experiences it seems that a flexible range of e.g. 40-75% has proven reasonable in order to maximise the number of transnational projects that can be funded. In any case flexibility is highly recommended and it should still be possible to adjust exact percentages if needed, e.g. via a decision of the Steering Board.
As a general approach to unblock situations related to funding gaps when the list of projects recommended for funding is set up, the main goal should be to explore first all possibilities at national/regional level (i.e. involved funding organisations shall make all reasonable efforts to match national/regional funding with the success of their respective research communities).
