MSCA Excellence 1.1: Objectives, Ambition and Going Beyond the State of the Art

MSCA Excellence 1.1: Objectives, Ambition and Going Beyond the State of the Art is part of the MSCA Career Acceleration knowledge base for researchers who want to convert research quality into stronger funding, career and implementation outcomes.

Why this topic matters

A Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions proposal is evaluated as a complete research and career-development project. Strong writing alone is insufficient. The proposal must show a credible research question, a defensible methodology, a suitable host environment, meaningful supervision and training, a realistic implementation plan, and a clear explanation of the value created for the researcher, host organisation and wider research or innovation ecosystem. The practical purpose of reviewing this topic is to make every important claim visible, supported and easy for an evaluator to understand.

Read the proposal as an evaluator.

A useful review starts by changing perspective. Instead of asking whether a paragraph sounds impressive, ask what evidence an evaluator can actually identify. Each important statement should answer at least one of four questions: what will be done, why it matters, how it will be done, and what evidence makes the plan credible. Ambiguous claims, generic adjectives and unsupported promises usually consume space without strengthening the case. Review therefore focuses on traceability between objectives, methods, work packages, training, expected results and impact.

Excellence and research quality.

Excellence should make the scientific or technical contribution understandable to a reader who knows the field but may not share the applicant’s exact specialisation. Objectives need to be specific enough to assess, connected to the state of the art, and supported by an appropriate methodology. Interdisciplinary elements should have a clear function rather than being decorative. Open-science practices, data handling, reproducibility and relevant diversity or gender dimensions should be integrated where scientifically meaningful. The researcher profile, supervision and two-way knowledge transfer should reinforce the project rather than appear as separate administrative text.

Impact and career development

Impact is stronger when it is built from realistic pathways rather than broad statements. The proposal should explain how the fellowship changes the researcher’s skills, independence, employability, network and capacity to lead future projects. Dissemination, exploitation and communication need distinct audiences, outputs, channels and timing. Commercial or societal potential should be described through plausible users, stakeholders, decision makers or markets. A strong impact section connects research outputs to career development and to longer-term use of the knowledge after the fellowship ends.

Implementation and feasibility.

Implementation converts the idea into an executable plan. Work packages should map to objectives and methods, while milestones and deliverables provide evidence that progress can be monitored. Risks should be concrete enough to manage, with mitigation actions that are credible rather than generic. The Gantt chart, person-month logic, secondments, training activities and host resources should tell one consistent story. Reviewers should be able to see that the proposed work fits the available time and that dependencies between tasks are understood.

How to perform a serious review.

A rigorous review can be performed in several passes. First, check structural completeness against the current official template and call documents. Second, test the scientific logic from problem to objectives, methods and outputs. Third, test the career and training logic. Fourth, test impact pathways and stakeholder relevance. Fifth, check implementation consistency, timing and risk. Finally, perform an evaluator-style pass focused on clarity, evidence, internal consistency and page economy. This is more reliable than simply proofreading from the first page to the last.

Evidence, specificity and page economy

Competitive proposals use limited space efficiently. Tables, short evidence statements and carefully designed cross-references can often carry more information than long narrative passages. Numerical targets should be used when they are meaningful and defensible. Publications, preliminary results, facilities, supervisor expertise, networks, industry links and training opportunities are useful only when they support the exact project logic. The goal is not to make the proposal look dense; it is to reduce the amount of inference required from the evaluator.

What to do after the review.

The output of a review should be an ordered revision plan. High-priority items are usually missing logic, weak evidence, contradictions, feasibility concerns and unclear impact pathways. Lower-priority items include stylistic polishing and formatting. A mature proposal can also be reused beyond one call: as the basis of another funding application, a research programme, an industry collaboration, a commercialisation pathway, a startup or an independent research-centre concept. The proposal therefore deserves to be treated as a reusable research asset rather than a one-time document.

Practical review question

Return to the central question of this article and test it against evidence, timing, resources and the researcher’s next decision. A useful plan should identify what is already proven, what still needs validation, who must be involved, which document or output is required next, and how the result can remain useful across more than one funding or career pathway. This discipline turns broad ambition into a sequence of research and professional actions that can be reviewed and improved over time.

Analytical perspective and research use.

The topic of MSCA Excellence 1.1: Objectives, Ambition and Going Beyond the State of the Art should be examined as part of a wider research strategy rather than as an isolated application task. In competitive European funding, the quality of an individual paragraph matters less than the consistency between the research question, evidence base, methodological choices, researcher development and implementation environment. Researchers can use this perspective to test whether each section contributes to the same scientific and professional direction.

A second analytical layer concerns transferability. Proposal work should generate reusable knowledge: a stronger literature position, clearer objectives, a documented methodology, a network map, a work plan and an impact model. These assets remain relevant for later funding calls, publications, collaboration with industry, research commercialisation and the development of an independent research programme. Treating the application as a reusable research asset increases the value of preparation even when the immediate funding decision is uncertain.

Finally, the researcher should distinguish evidence from aspiration. Statements about excellence, impact, employability, commercial potential or institutional capacity need observable support. Depending on the topic, support may come from preliminary results, publications, facilities, letters of commitment, stakeholder conversations, market evidence, training resources or a documented track record. The objective is not to add every possible piece of information, but to select the evidence that reduces uncertainty for the evaluator or decision-maker.