High number of submissions for the 2nd open call for business experiments: Adaptation of the evaluation procedure
A total of 310 eligible proposals were submitted to the 2nd open call for business experiments. This makes it impractical to execute the evaluation procedure as outlined in the call text.
In order to try to reduce the negative impact on the project schedules, both the evaluation phase and subsequent execution of the selected business experiments, we are therefore preceding the evaluation of proposals with an "Overall Impact Evaluation" (OIE). Each proposal will be read by two independent experts who will provide responses to a set of questions relating to the impact criteria, including the alignment with call objectives. Proposals for which there is a consensus opinion that an overall impact criterion is not fulfilled will be excluded from a full evaluation; the impact criteria selected are all such that a proposal would be scored below threshold in a full evaluation applying strict criteria. The proposers will receive an evaluation summary report relating only to the criteria not fulfilled.
We believe that it is in everyone's interest to quickly identify and filter out proposals that do not have a chance to end up in the top 6-7% of proposals that can be funded, in order to complete the whole evaluation and achieve a selection and start of the new experiments in a reasonable time frame. Nevertheless, while the results of the Overall Impact Evaluation should be available around the beginning of November, we estimate that the results of the full evaluation will not be ready before the end of February 2026.