• Horizon 2020 has proven hugely popular as shown by the 36 732 proposals evaluated in these first calls. The success rate - around 1 in 8 proposals have been successful – is, however, lower than the 1 in 5 rate for the seven years of the 7th Framework Programme for Research (FP7).
• It is perhaps too early to draw firm conclusions from these first calls for Horizon 2020 as a whole over seven years, but many factors could be at play here.
• Compared with FP7, we see that businesses, notably SMEs, have done relatively well, which reflects the strong focus that Horizon 2020 has on innovation.
• Nevertheless, it is expected that overall under Horizon 2020, given the increased budget, all types of organisations will receive much more funding than under FP7.

Note: H2020 (Horizon 2020) data is for 2014; FP7 data is for 2007-2013.
Legend: Public Org. (PUB), Research Org. (REC), Private For-Profit Org. (PRC), Higher or Sec. Education, all and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)  Org. (HES), OTH - Others 

• The target that 20% of money from the Societal Challenges and Leading and Emerging Industrial Technologies action lines should go to SMEs has been easily achieved..

Note: H2020 (Horizon 2020) data is for 2014; FP7 data is for 2007-2013.

• 38% of the organisations that received funding in the first 100 calls are newcomers. These 2585 newcomers will receive around 12% of funding. However nearly half of these newcomers - around 1200  - are SMEs and are less likely to request large grants. This, and the fact that newcomers tend not to participate in multiple projects, can explain the disparity between the percentage of newcomers and the percentage of funding they received..

Note: H2020 (Horizon 2020) data is for 2014; FP7 data is for 2007-2013.

• Good progress has also been made in renewing the pool of experts who evaluate proposals. Almost half the people on the database of expert-evaluators are newcomers. And of the 11 000 experts who took part in the evaluation of proposals, 35% are female. This means that good progress is being made towards the 40% target, but more effort is needed to encourage female experts to register, especially in areas such as the physical sciences and engineering.

• Following the closure dates of the first 100 calls for proposals, 95% of the grant agreements of the successful proposals have been signed within the target of eight months. This means that over 3 200 research and innovation projects were able to start before the end of April 2015.