What becomes of the prototypes, software and pilots that European research projects leave behind once the final review is over? Anna Lackner, founder and managing director of the Munich-based Nexuswelt Group, who works on the exploitation and uptake of EU-funded results, argues that Europe is good at checking whether projects deliver but knows far too little about what happens to their results afterwards – and proposes a light, structured follow-up to find out.
Anyone who has spent enough time in European research projects knows the last review. The consortium gets together, now usually on a video call, and walks the project officer and reviewers through three or four years of work. Deliverables are closed. Milestones are ticked off, perhaps one or two after an amendment. The prototype is shown, sometimes live and sometimes in a recording made beforehand, because live demonstrations have a habit of becoming unpredictable at exactly the wrong moment. Then come the familiar slides: Key Exploitable Results, exploitation plan, dissemination figures. A few weeks later the review report arrives and, if all went well, the project is formally complete. By then, many of the same people are already absorbed in the next proposal or the next project.
I have been on that side of the table many times, leading work packages and working on exploitation, communication and impact. Final reviews matter. They tell us whether the consortium did what it was funded to do. What they cannot tell us, and cannot really be expected to tell us, is whether the result will still have a life once the project structure disappears.
The part that interests me starts later. A year on, who is still maintaining the software? Did the industrial partner that liked the demonstrator ever find an internal budget to take it further? Did the city or hospital that hosted the pilot actually buy anything afterwards? Did a recommendation make it into a standard, a procurement process or a policy discussion? And how many technically good results simply stayed where they were on review day: finished, documented and with nobody quite responsible for the next step?
That is also the period I have started looking at more closely in my doctoral research. After years of working inside European projects, I kept coming back to the same point: once there is no common budget, no reporting calendar and no contractual reason to keep the consortium together, the conditions change completely. The result has to find a new owner, a new budget, a new customer or a new institutional home. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it quietly stops.
Over time I have become wary of using the same word, ‘success’, for both stages. A consortium can deliver exactly what it promised and pass every review while the result later goes nowhere. Another result may find a second life in a product, a licence, a procurement process, a standard, another region or another line of research. Project delivery and the later trajectory of the result are connected, but they are not the same thing.
What Europe already follows
Horizon Europe already addresses part of this challenge. Applicants are asked to explain pathways to impact before funding starts. Projects identify results, declare ownership and maintain dissemination and exploitation plans. Under the Horizon Europe Model Grant Agreement, funded beneficiaries must use their best efforts to exploit their results for up to four years after the action ends. If a result is still not exploited one year after the end, they must, unless otherwise agreed with the granting authority, use the Horizon Results Platform to look for interested parties. At programme level, Key Impact Pathways are designed to capture scientific, societal and economic effects over different time horizons.
There are also cases where post-project follow-up is already much more explicit. Research and Innovation Actions funded by Global Health EDCTP3 must submit an annual report on the development status and exploitation of their results on each anniversary of the end of the grant, for up to four years. In other words, part of the Horizon Europe system already recognises that some of the most important evidence arrives after the project has formally closed.
The European IP Helpdesk has also described a structured post-grant exploitation questionnaire intended for two years after the end of a grant. The guidance said that this instrument was still being drafted. I have not found public evidence that it became a programme-wide mechanism, and the available guidance does not explain why. What it does show is that the question of post-project evidence has been recognised for some time.
Around this sit the Horizon Results Platform, exploitation support services, the European IP Helpdesk, Innovation Radar, the EIC pathway from Pathfinder to Transition and Accelerator, and dedicated ‘Proof of Market’ actions in the 2026–2027 work programme. Europe also evaluates its programmes through surveys, case studies, patent analysis, econometric modelling and other portfolio-level methods.
A lightweight result-level follow-up should complement, not replace, those methods. It could add something different: a more consistent record of what happened to significant individual results, including where continuity was sustained and where it was lost. Elements of this already exist in some instruments and sectors, but not with the same minimum structure across the wider programme.
Four common routes after the grant
There is no single path for an EU-funded result once a project ends. The examples below are publicly documented European cases used to illustrate different continuation routes; Nexuswelt was not involved in these projects. They are not formal Horizon Europe categories, but four illustrative routes visible across publicly documented cases: commercial development, follow-on funding, procurement and an institutional home.
1. Commercial route: Intrinsic ID
Intrinsic ID existed before the EU-funded PUFFIN project, so its later acquisition by Synopsys cannot be attributed to one grant. The European Commission does, however, record that PUFFIN contributed to the authentication technology developed by the company.
What this shows: an EU project can be one stage in a longer commercial journey when there is a company able to keep developing the result after the grant.
2. Follow-on funding route: ChipScope → SMILE → iSMILE
ChipScope developed microLED technology for chip-based microscopy. SMILE started before ChipScope had formally ended, and the work later continued through iSMILE in the EIC pathway.
What this shows: for deep tech, continuity is easier when the next development and funding step is already forming before the previous project closes.
3. Procurement route: Erasmus University Medical Centre
This is a contrast case rather than a post-grant R&I result, but it makes the buyer question very clear. The Rotterdam hospital, which won the 2014 Public Procurement of Innovation Award for a robotic bed-cleaning facility, had a concrete operational need and a route to procure a solution.
What this shows: a successful pilot is not the same as adoption. To move further, someone normally needs the mandate to buy, a budget and a procurement route.
4. Institutional route: FIWARE
After the FP7 Future Internet partnership, the FIWARE Foundation provided an independent home for the technology and ecosystem. The work also continued through standards and public digital infrastructure.
What this shows: a result does not always need to become a product or be acquired. It can continue through a foundation, a standard, a platform or another organisation that takes responsibility for it.
These four routes make the practical point clearer. After the grant, a result may need a market owner, another funding instrument, a buyer or an institutional home. Different results need different routes, so post-project impact cannot be judged by commercialisation alone.
Longer-term monitoring can help show which routes actually work. The EIC’s 2026 Impact Report records more than 1,800 innovations emerging from EIC Pathfinder and Transition projects, more than 140 start-ups created from those research programmes and €5 billion mobilised in private co-investment. The European Patent Office offers another benchmark: in its 2020 study based on 686 patent cases from 241 European universities and public research organisations, 36% of the inventions were already being commercially exploited and another 42% were planned for commercialisation.
The practical question is therefore not simply whether a project produced a result. It is whether, after the grant, that result had a clear next route and somebody able to carry it forward.
Where the next step gets lost
The weak point is often not the technology itself. Ownership may be shared. The researcher who carried the work may leave. The industrial partner may value the result but have no internal owner for it. Everyone around the table can agree that something is promising while nobody controls the next budget.
Large companies have their own version of the problem. A project team may participate enthusiastically in the research while the business unit that would need to finance industrialisation sits elsewhere in the organisation. The grant paid for research participation. The next investment decision belongs to another team, under another budget and often another timetable.
Public-sector projects create a similar mismatch. Proposal language can blur users, stakeholders, pilot hosts, adopters and buyers. In practice these roles are very different. The people who need the solution may not control the budget. The organisation hosting the pilot may not be the contracting authority. A department may want to continue using the result and still be unable to purchase it without a new tender.
Shared intellectual property creates another handover problem. Several partners may each own part of a result, while none has the authority, commercial capability or incentive to move it alone. An exploitation plan can look perfectly credible while the consortium is funded and still leave a practical ownership problem the day after it closes.
Deep-tech projects face a different clock. A working demonstrator may still be several investment decisions away from industrial validation. If the next funding instrument, corporate budget or private investment arrives eighteen months later, the team may already have changed. ChipScope and SMILE illustrate the advantage of having the next stage underway before the first one formally ends.
Much of this is familiar in consortium work. What is harder to see is how often each pattern occurs, in which sectors and at what stage. Without a comparable follow-up, experience stays local. The same lessons are learned by different consortia without becoming evidence for programme design.
A lighter follow-up
I would not solve this by adding another stand-alone report. The next programme is explicitly moving towards simplification, and the Commission proposal provides for lump-sum funding to become the default form of Union contribution unless otherwise provided. Any post-project mechanism should follow that direction rather than create a parallel reporting layer.
There is a lighter route. Horizon Europe beneficiaries already have an exploitation obligation that can run for up to four years after the action ends. A short structured follow-up could sit within that existing period and be triggered by the granting authority through the grant-management system, rather than becoming another narrative report.
The starting point already exists: the results ownership list and the Key Exploitable Results identified by the project. At twelve and twenty-four months, perhaps again at thirty-six where the action type justifies it, the current owner or owners could receive a short structured follow-up.
The questions do not need to be elaborate. Is the result still active? Has ownership changed? Has it attracted follow-on public funding or private investment? Has it entered a product or service, been licensed, procured or adopted? Has it contributed to a standard, regulation or policy process? Has it been replicated? If development stopped, what was the main reason?
Where ownership is shared, all listed owners should be contacted rather than assuming one organisation speaks for the result. If nobody can identify who now owns the next step, that is itself an important state to record. A non-response should not be interpreted as failure, but the response rate should be published so that nobody mistakes incomplete follow-up for complete evidence.
MSCA offers a useful warning as well as a precedent. The programme asks fellows to complete a questionnaire immediately after the fellowship and another two years later. Since 2018, more than 21,000 fellows have completed the first questionnaire, while nearly 2,500 have completed the follow-up. These totals should not be read as directly comparable response rates: the Commission notes that many Horizon 2020 projects had only recently finished or were still ongoing and that responses were still being collected.
The design implication is practical. The questionnaire must be short, the ownership data must be kept current, reminders need to work, and coverage and attrition must be reported transparently.
Patterns, not league tables
The value would come from recurring patterns rather than a new league table of ‘successful’ organisations. If technically successful public-sector pilots repeatedly stop because procurement never begins, that tells us something about project design and purchasing. If deep-tech results repeatedly disappear between demonstration and industrial validation, the gap is different. If fragmented IP appears again and again as the reason nobody could act, the intervention belongs earlier in consortium governance.
Failure must also remain a legitimate answer. Some results should stop. Research is uncertain, technologies are overtaken, markets do not materialise and hypotheses turn out to be wrong. A follow-up system that penalises every non-surviving result would teach beneficiaries to declare less, or to keep stalled results indefinitely ‘under discussion with interested parties’. Anyone who has worked on final reporting knows how little that tells us.
This type of result-level evidence would not establish causal attribution. Intrinsic ID is a good example of why it should not try. Companies, technologies and policy changes are shaped by multiple investments and decisions over time. Programme evaluation will still need counterfactual analysis, patent studies, surveys and portfolio methods. The result-level record would answer a simpler question: what happened next, and where was continuity sustained or lost?
The timing makes that question more relevant, but it also constrains the design. The Commission has proposed €175 billion for Horizon Europe for 2028–2034, with a stronger emphasis on simplification and a closer connection between research, innovation and deployment. The Council agreed its partial negotiating position on 26 June 2026, and negotiations continue. Whatever the final figure, better evidence about what happens after funding should come from light, structured follow-up rather than heavier reporting.
Somebody still has to be looking
Not every result should continue, and no process can guarantee that it will. But exploitation works better when it is treated as a handover rather than a final-report exercise: who owns the result, who may use or buy it, which route exists for continuation, and what evidence should be captured before the consortium disperses.
Europe already knows how to assemble ambitious cross-border consortia. Universities, SMEs, large companies, public authorities and research organisations can spend several years solving the same problem. The harder evidence appears after that temporary structure begins to dissolve.
A final review can show whether a consortium delivered the work it promised. It cannot show whether the result later found a buyer, another investor, a standard, a policy home or simply a person with the mandate to keep going. By the time those answers exist, somebody still has to be looking.
About the author
Anna Lackner is the founder and managing director of Nexuswelt Group, a Munich-based EU funding and innovation agency. She has more than ten years’ experience in European innovation projects, with a background in semiconductors, IoT, digitalisation and Industry 4.0, and works on exploitation, impact and technology uptake in European R&I projects, including industrial and deep-tech collaborations. She is pursuing doctoral research in business administration and political science at the Ukrainian Free University in Munich, focusing on what happens to publicly funded innovation after the funding period ends.