Following my previous posts on the role EIC (European Innovation Council) interviews are having on selecting EIC Accelerator winners, I have received tens of messages from companies who have been rejected at the interview by a panel who strongly contradicted the evaluation performed by remote evaluators. Most applicants received inconsistent and brief feedback reasoning the rejection. In short: the people at Brussels didn’t like the assessment performed by external and independent evaluators.
After several discussions with applicants, I can now clearly see the pros and cons that interviews present.
The conversation around the role and weight of interviews in the selection process is relevant as it has become the main selection step in the EIC Accelerator with 80% of the interviewed companies receiving a rejection. This means that 80% of the interview panels disagree with the opinion of all previous evaluators.
Advantages
Interviews have been progressively introduced as a selection mechanism in several Horizon Europe programmes including the EIC Accelerator and there are obvious benefits of interviewing candidates as part of the selection process:
1- Interviews are a very direct mechanism to interact with candidates, clarify hidden aspects in the proposals as well as check for inconsistencies.
2- Interviews can also be very effective in order to assess candidates’ soft skills. In the end, candidates should be able to defend their projects orally and promptly reply to questions or address potential gaps. In reality, soft skills will also be needed to run the funded projects smoothly post-award or to commercialise the products or services derived from the funded R&D activities.
3- Interviews can also be effective to assess the real capabilities and abilities of the whole team and identify potential deficiencies that could have been hidden in the proposal.
Disadvantages
However, interviews also present important deficiencies in selecting winning projects.
1- It has been demonstrated that interviews can be heavily biased in assessing projects. Even the time and date, or the order of interview, can have an important impact on the evaluation. Towards the end of the day, for instance, panels tend to be tired and lose focus.
2- During interviews, panels could be prone to overvalue some proposals when the pitchers are specially skilled at presenting.
3- Interviews can also be affected by “group thinking”, when a person in the committee with leadership skills can gear the result and the opinion of others.
My personal opinion is that interviews are a perfect complement to remote expert assessments. While remote experts judge the proposals independently and in-depth, face-to-face interviews can check for other aspects of the team.
However, EIC interviews have been problematic because they have not complemented but replaced the rest of the evaluations, and this, I believe, it’s a bold error. Obvious concerns about independence, neutrality and bias arise when the remote expert evaluation is replaced by an evaluation made in a closed room in Brussels.
There are ways to circumvent these issues. In the particular cases in which the EIC interview panel strongly disagrees with the remote evaluation, this disagreement should be presented in a very detailed way elaborating on the strong arguments that counter remote evaluators point of views. The EIC and other Horizon Europe agencies using interviews must make a strong effort in disclosing all the details behind an interview evaluation, especially if the evaluation disagrees with external experts’ opinions.
Article writen by David Arias and published on Linkedin on the 6th of November of 2024.
