Guide

Find EU project partners

Building an EU consortium means matching technical excellence with operational reality: prior participations, coordinator experience, geographic balance, and a credible story for the evaluator. A partner list should be evidence-led.

What "partner" means in CORDIS

In CORDIS, a partner is an organization linked to a funded project through a participation row — sometimes as coordinator, sometimes as beneficiary or linked third party depending on the programme rules captured in the data. GRANTIBASE aggregates those rows so you can see who shows up repeatedly in a topic, who leads, and who tends to appear alongside whom in the same funded consortia.

From idea to shortlist

Use the Partner Finder to express your search as a topic or keyword plus optional geography. Narrow or widen the programme filter: Horizon Europe for current pillar work, Horizon 2020 for legacy patterns, or leave the programme open when you want a broader European picture. The tool is built to return organizations and coordinators that match the slice, not every entity in the database.

For each interesting organization, open its profile to see coordinated versus partner-only roles, top collaborators, and recurring topics. That triangulation is often faster than reading dozens of project factsheets manually.

Beyond the shortlist

When you need raw project rows (budget bands, call codes, dates), use Advanced search. When you care about a specific funding call, start from Calls to see suggested partners derived from projects funded under that identifier. Consultants and NCP teams often combine all three: Partner Finder for discovery, calls for call-specific context, search for diligence.