Europe excels in producing cutting-edge research and technology, yet many promising innovations fail to materialize into globally leading companies. Despite having top-tier universities, research institutions, and substantial government-backed funding, many high-potential breakthroughs stall before reaching the market. A recent EU-commissioned report led by former ECB President Mario Draghi, highlights this gap, calling for fewer bureaucratic hurdles, faster tech transfer, and a more agile funding landscape to help Europe compete on a global scale [1]. However, these shifts won't happen overnight. In the meantime, teams working within the existing grant system must find ways to maximize impact and flexibility, ensuring that research leads to real-world value.

In this article, we’ll explore:

• How to embrace an exploitation mindset from the start, ensuring research translates into tangible impact.
• Practical ways to maximize agility using lean principles within long-term, rigid EU-funded projects.

These strategies allow teams to navigate the constraints of long-term grants while maximizing the real-world value of their innovations.

Embrace an Exploitation Mindset

Exploitation—ensuring research translates into real-world impact—is a formal requirement in EU-funded projects, particularly Horizon Europe [2]. Yet in practice, it often becomes an afterthought, with teams scrambling to justify impact only when evaluations are due. This reactive approach stems from two core issues:

1. Rigid project structures favor milestone-based execution over agile, market-driven approaches.
2. Behavioral biases push teams to follow written plans rather than reassessing their relevance.

By embedding a flexible, exploitation-driven mindset early, projects can avoid these pitfalls and maximize impact.

Embedding Lean and Agile Thinking in Grant-Funded Research

The lean startup[3] and lean impact[4] methodologies emphasize experimentation, iteration, and customer validation, all essential for ensuring research meets real-world needs. However, EU projects typically follow waterfall-style structures, creating challenges such as:

• Slow feedback loops: Market validation often comes too late for meaningful course correction.
• Rigid objectives: Deliverables take precedence over adapting to new insights.
• Exploitation as a checkbox: Treated as an endpoint rather than a continuous process.

To overcome this, teams should treat exploitation as an ongoing, iterative effort, integrating customer feedback, real-world validation, and market adaptation throughout the project lifecycle.

Overcoming Biases That Undermine Exploitation

Cognitive biases shape decision-making in ways that hinder project impact [5]. In EU projects, key biases include:

• Sunk cost fallacy: Sticking to outdated plans due to past investments.
• Planning fallacy & optimism bias: Underestimating risks and overestimating early projections.
• Groupthink & confirmation bias: Avoiding critical evaluation of assumptions.

To counter these biases, project teams should rethink both planning and execution:

• Agile proposal design: Build in validation milestones and flexible funding to allow for adaptation.
• Living exploitation plan: Revisit and revise regularly rather than treating it as a static deliverable.
• Reality checks: Conduct ongoing customer discovery, market validation, and external reviews to challenge assumptions.
• Lean execution: Treat experimentation, prototyping, and iterative feedback as core research strategies—not just commercialization tactics.

By embedding adaptability into both planning and execution, projects can move from a compliance-driven approach to one that prioritizes real-world impact—ensuring research leads to tangible, sustainable outcomes.

Maximize Agility and Lean Principles within Long-Term Grants

Long-term grants often follow rigid structures, but this doesn't mean projects must be inflexible. By applying lean startup principles—rapid experimentation, iterative learning, and customer-driven development—teams can adapt to market changes while staying within grant constraints. These principles are essential for enhancing agility and impact in EU-funded projects.

Running Lean by Ash Maurya [6] outlines strategies for testing assumptions, iterating quickly, and focusing on customer needs, which are key for navigating the bureaucratic constraints of EU funding. This section highlights three core concepts that can be adapted to EU projects: Customer Discovery, Validating Assumptions, and Lean Experimentation.

Embrace Customer Discovery in all Project Stages

Engage with users and stakeholders early and throughout the project to validate assumptions and gather feedback. Start this process while writing the original grant proposal and continue through each project phase. This ensures the research remains relevant and adaptable to real-world needs. While many projects include potential customers as partners, a more impactful approach is to assess demand outside the project itself, providing an unbiased view of whether you're on track.

Integrate customer discovery into the grant proposal by embedding iterative feedback loops and customer validation into the project’s milestones. This ensures flexibility and strengthens the project’s impact, making exploitation an ongoing focus throughout the lifecycle.

To refine your approach, read The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick [7], which offers valuable insights into gathering actionable customer data without bias.

Validate Assumptions Early and Continuously

Maurya emphasizes identifying and testing assumptions as early as possible. The Lean Canvas helps teams quickly outline their project hypotheses, including problem, solution, unique value proposition, key metrics, and channels. This comprehensive one-page model is designed to capture the most important aspects of a business or project plan.

However, for EU-funded projects, especially those with long-term goals and complex market dynamics, the Leaner Lean Canvas offers a more focused approach. This version streamlines the Lean Canvas by emphasizing customer segments, early adopters, existing alternatives, and the problems with those alternatives. It is particularly useful in contexts where refining a unique value proposition and understanding market needs is critical but where flexibility and focus on specific customer pain points are paramount.

Using tools like the Leaner Lean Canvas ensures tighter alignment between project goals and real-world market needs, making it easier to pivot or adapt based on ongoing feedback. Regularly iterating on this streamlined model helps project teams refine their assumptions, increasing the likelihood of exploitable outcomes and reducing wasted resources on features or solutions that might not meet market demand.

Lean Experimentation and Iterative Learning

Maurya advocates for rapid experimentation through cycles of prototyping, testing, and learning. This approach, particularly using two-week sprints and quarterly business model adaptations, can be applied to EU-funded projects. The Build-Measure-Learn loop enables teams to iterate quickly and make data-driven decisions.

For grant projects, applying lean experimentation means conducting small-scale tests or prototypes early to verify assumptions. This prevents wasted resources on unviable approaches and fosters agility within the structured framework of EU funding, allowing for course corrections while maintaining project focus.

Conclusion: Unlock Greater Impact through Flexibility and Innovation

The road from research to market is rarely a straight path, especially within the structured confines of long-term EU grants. By embracing an exploitation mindset, continuously validating assumptions, and applying lean principles, we can ensure that even within rigid frameworks, research projects can evolve, adapt, and maximize their real-world impact. Not every grant proposal will be perfect from the start, and that’s okay. The key is to embrace change and pivot when necessary. Change requests should not be seen as setbacks, but as opportunities to fine-tune and drive greater results.

To truly unlock the potential of EU-funded research, future grant structures must evolve in line with Draghi's recommendations, embracing more agility, flexibility, and room for real-time course corrections. This would allow teams to better navigate shifting market needs, make more effective use of limited resources, and accelerate innovation.

It’s time to rethink how we approach research funding and its real-world application. If you're ready to explore how these strategies can enhance your own projects or if you have ideas on how EU funding can be better aligned with impact, I’d love to connect. Get in touch here.

Citations:

1. M. Draghi, "The Future of European Competitiveness: A Competitiveness Strategy for Europe," European Commission, 9 September 2024. [Online]. Available: here. [Accessed: 13-Feb-2025].
2. European Commission, "Dissemination and exploitation of research results," European Commission. [Online]. Available: here. [Accessed: 13-Feb-2025].
3. E. Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. New York, NY, USA: Crown Business, 2011.
4. Ann Mei Chang, Lean impact : How to innovate for radically greater social good. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2019.
5. B. Flyvbjerg, "Top Ten Behavioral Biases in Project Management: An Overview," Project Management Journal, vol. 52, no. 6, pp. 531–546, Dec. 2021.
6. A. Maurya, Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works. Sebastopol, CA, USA: O'Reilly Media, 2012.
7. R. Fitzpatrick, The mom test : How to talk to customers and learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you. London: Founder Centric, 2013.