Henna Gustafsson is working as a research funding advisor at the University of Jyväskylä Research and Innovation Services in central Finland. She and her colleagues offer pre-award services to researchers and staff of the university and they have recently started to use Spinbase, which is an AI-based funding search tool developed by Spinverse. Spinbase helps Henna in her daily work to identify EU funding opportunities for the university’s researchers. The results have been very positive.
As part of their work, Henna Gustafsson and her colleagues help university researchers to apply for external funding from different sources in Finland and abroad. They also provide related training and support the researchers in identifying and finding relevant funding channels. Supporting the researchers in preparing the funding proposals is also part of the pre-award services in Research and Innovation Services at the University of Jyväskylä.
When Henna starts the dialogue with a researcher, there are quite a few questions that she needs to address: What are the actual needs for which the researcher requires funding? Is it about research as part of a consortium or is the researcher working on their own? Does the researcher already have a partner abroad with whom to apply for funding together? In addition, Henna Gustafsson needs to discuss with the researchers how collaboration, if any, would support the proposal process.
When looking at the funding opportunities offered by the European Union’s upcoming Horizon Europe, the scope is overwhelmingly wide. This is where Spinbase steps in to help Henna and other professionals like her who need a practical tool to identify the relevant topics, funding calls and partners for different research and innovation projects. Henna Gustafsson currently uses Spinbase on a weekly basis, but as the Horizon Europe evolves and calls are being released, her internal customers, the researchers, will soon be turning to Henna and her colleagues for help — Henna anticipates even more frequent usage then.
Spinbase impresses by its ease of use
After using Spinbase since December 2020, Henna considers it a very practical and easy-to-use tool. Henna says: “Spinbase user interface is developed with the user in mind. Search engine accepts long text entities and yields comprehensive results — sometimes with funding opportunities we may not have even thought about. The search results are clear and ready for further evaluation or processing. It is a real time saver!”
Henna warmly recommends Spinbase to any of her peers who work in research organisations seeking for EU funding. In the future, she is also looking forward to trying out Spinbase to find relevant partners for her internal clients, as a tool to reflect project ideas with existing research projects.
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