You have finally received the long-waited fantastic “Invitation to Contract Negotiation” letter which means that you scored above the threshold and your project has been chosen for funding. Now what?
Welcome to the wonderful world of Contract Negotiation. It is now time for you to start understanding how EU works, legislations and regulations and more. Let’s start with who is who in a typical FP7 project:
Project Officer and Legal Financial Officer:These two scary sounding figures will be your best friends in the next few months or so. They are in short your “supervisors”. You will listen to what they want and provide it on time. They can be really demanding but this is understandable.
The Coordinator: The main company in the consortium who will manage the whole project. Generally the coordinator is the comnpany who came up with the idea in the first place. Their ultimate role is to keep things in track in the project.
The Partners: These are the other companies that forms the project consortium. They report directly to the coordinator. The partnersd can change during the project and there is now an easier mechanism to do this compare to FP6 projects.
Third Parties (Sub-contractors): They can be organisations or individuals. They are not part of the core project consortium but can be very useful during the implementation of the project. Your project officer will not like them very much and will be against transferring too much money towards the third parties.
If you have a question or suggestion, please do not hesitate to contact me using the form below.
