The Form Is The Evaluation

A reviewer opens a folder with a phone on silent and nothing else on the desk. Fourteen documents. No presentation, no call, no handshake on the way in. The programme publishes its whole procedure before anyone applies. Two of those documents carry the technical verdict: Anlage 4, the technical and scientific objective of the project, and Anlage 5, the work plan underneath it. The procedure says so in plain language. Anlagen 4 and 5 are the core of the technical assessment, and every other page in the file exists to make those two believable. Read that as an applicant. The pitch is not the evaluation. The file is the evaluation. The document centre holds 24 documents across three pages, filterable by programme and by regional variant. Nothing in there is hidden. Nothing sits behind an account. Almost nobody opens it before a deadline that does not exist. Fourteen documents, two of them decisive, and the work you are most proud of is only one of the two.

Every form carries a version number and a date, and the programme keeps them current. The market-oriented module application form sits at version 1.16, dated 10 October 2025. The pre-research form is version 1.14, dated 2 April 2026. The infrastructure form is version 1.12, dated 10 October 2025. The guidance notes for the market and pre-research modules read version 1.18, dated 15 September 2025, and the infrastructure notes read 1.19 of the same date. The funds request form for infrastructure is version 2.10, dated 26 November 2025. The proof-of-use documents for both module families are dated 10 October 2025. An optional project sketch exists before the full application, at version 1.10, dated 22 May 2025. The folder you saved two years ago is not this file. A form filled on an old template is not a formatting problem. It is an answer to a question the programme stopped asking. Version discipline is the cheapest step in the whole process, and it is the first place a file loses points it will never win back.

The set is not a pile. It is a calculation. Anlage 6, the capacity plan, is generated straight out of Anlage 5. Anlage 8, the total pre-calculation, is generated out of Anlagen 9b and 10 through 13: personnel, external services, material, travel, investments. Change one line in one cost category and three documents move with it. The Mantelbogen, the cover sheet, does not ask you for a funding sum. It takes the sum from Anlage 8. It asks for a project title short enough to be read twice, signatures in the order the representation rules require, and a current register extract, with the non-profit evidence and, for an association, the statutes and the member list. So the cover sheet is a mirror, not a form. Fill the cost attachments first and the cover sheet becomes arithmetic.

Anlage 5 is the work plan, counted in person-months per work package and per person, at full-time equivalent. The published ceiling is 6 person-months per work package. One number, and it is a planning instruction. A project holding 18 person-months of labour cannot be a single work package. It is three, and the boundary between them has to hold for someone reading a plan rather than watching the work. Two more attachments put your history on the table. Anlage 2 lists every research project currently running and every project closed in the last 5 years, this programme included. Anlage 3 asks what happened to the completed work: how it was used, to what extent, and where it was not used, why not. Then follow-up projects, patents and publications. An institution with a quiet record writes the quiet part down. There is a field for it. There is no field for explaining it later.

The file is the evaluation. The pitch is not.

Anlage 7 is the exploitation plan, and it asks two different things depending on the module you are in. In the market-oriented module it wants a marketing and transfer concept carrying a quantitative estimate of economic effects. The procedure calls that decisive for the chance of approval. In pre-research, the same numbered attachment expects no concrete commercial exploitation at all. It wants innovation potential and later application possibilities, named and sized, not priced. Copy the market module's exploitation plan into a pre-research application and you answer a question nobody asked, in a document the reviewer was told to read differently. The subsidy proof stands on its own. Without public funding the project either cannot be carried out, or can only be carried out with considerable delay. That is the test of funding necessity, and it has to be argued inside the file. A budget is not an argument.

Since 3 June 2025 the procedure is slimmer and digital. Documents filed with earlier applications can be referenced instead of resubmitted. The handling runs from application to project close without paper. Submission goes through one portal, enconnect.euronorm.de, and only through it. There are no cut-off dates. Applications arrive any time, as long as the application is filed before the funded work begins. Remove the deadline and one ordering rule is left, and it is the rule that catches people: the paper exists before the work does. A file is legally binding only in a signed version. A qualified electronic signature, or a signed and scanned copy. Nothing else carries the obligation. The portal confirms receipt and can come back asking for supplements, so a submitted file is a file still being read. Original documents stay in the institution for 10 years from submission. The fillable PDFs render correctly only in a current Adobe Acrobat Reader. A browser showing a loading screen is not the form. I have signed a personal guarantee. I have built machines and energy systems across twelve countries. Companies still fail on the paperwork long before the market reaches them. The pattern has not changed. The strong project is not the one with the best idea in the room. It is the one whose Anlage 4 and Anlage 5 can be read alone, by a stranger, with no phone call available. The probability that a good proposal is read as a weak one because the file was assembled in the wrong order is not zero. Most institutions price it at zero. Fix the file first. The science is the part you already know how to defend.