VTT finds Spinbase an excellent tool to identify suitable funding

Technical Research Center (VTT) experts in the European Commission Programmes team are specialised in scouting for suitable EU-funded calls to find funding for the VTT research projects. Isabel Pinto Seppä has worked on the challenging task to identify the suitable calls for VTT. She shares her experiences with Spinbase tool which she has found very helpful in fulfilling her tasks. 

Isabel Pinto Seppä worked as EC Programmes Manager at VTT until January 2020, and her work involved hands-on EU call searching to identify funding instruments for VTT research projects. One of the most helpful tools she used in her work was Spinbase, which is a tool developed by Spinverse to search for EU funding and partners in an easier way. Currently Isabel works as EC Affairs Manager at VTT International Affairs. 

Challenges in finding relevant funding calls 

Sometimes the task of spotting the relevant calls and topics in the European Commission's public information resources on all EU-funded research projects  can be somewhat daunting. Isabel notes that the official resources have been improved a lot over the years but using them successfully, a good understanding of the jargon used in the calls and expertise on the topic at hand is required. Most people are not ready to go into such depth of detail required by the these resources.

This is where Spinbase comes in to help anyone struggling with the complexity of the EU calls. Based on Isabel’s user experience with Spinbase, she finds it a very useful tool for portfolio managers and research coordinators who work with funding related tasks for their R&D organisations on a daily basis and need to find information quickly and efficiently. The tool is also useful for researchers even though they only submit a few proposals per year. 

Good results with Spinbase 

Isabel has mostly used Spinbase to find funding and to see projects that have already been prepared.  The overview, instrument, deadline and link to CORDIS have been displayed in an easy way for each call. The Power Point summary provided by Spinbase tool has also proved very useful in customer meetings, where the available funding is presented. 

“I have been using Spinbase when needing a fast overview of the EC-funded opportunities for a specific domain. The tool gives a comprehensive list of potential opportunities in an interface where I can easily check the contents and the critical information, as deadlines and type of instruments. It also allows me to export my selection to a table which I can use to support discussions, both internally and with VTT customers and partners.”​ 

Isabel Pinto Seppä, EC Affairs Manager, VTT International Affairs

Isabel has been very happy with the Spinbase user interface, which makes browsing and navigation back and forth very easy and where search yields good results. To sum up, Spinbase is a very professional tool for any researcher, coordinator or portfolio manager in research organisations and Isabel warmly recommends it to everyone involved in such tasks.

If you want to learn more about Spinbase, feel free to book your demo from here: www.spinbase.eu.