European Funding Networks

Mansfeld-Südharz, Germany - October 29, 2025

A county-scale playbook for turning Brussels acronyms into deployable euros

The first time we printed the EU’s multi-annual financial framework, it covered an entire wall of the former control room that now serves as the Alliance’s grant war-room. Seven hundred pages of dense Portuguese and Maltese footnotes looked impressive, but it did nothing to explain how a fourteen-person valve manufacturer in Zerbst could convert that text into a wire transfer. Over the following eighteen months we reduced the wall to a single A3 sheet that hangs above every desk like a metro map: colour-coded, station-labelled and, most importantly, distance-marked in calendar days rather than political cycles. The map does not list opportunities; it lists handshakes—who must be met, in which corridor, with which piece of paper, before the electronic submission portal even opens. What follows is the annotated version of that sheet, distilled from three successful consortia and two rejected ones, offered here because the overall pot is large enough that no one needs to treat funding intelligence as a trade secret.

The journey always starts with the same question: are you a single company, a municipality, or a research actor? The answer determines the door you walk through. For individual SMEs the fastest route is the EIC Accelerator (formerly SME Instrument) under Horizon Europe Cluster 3, where cyber-security is explicitly earmarked at 1.2 billion euros between 2025 and 2027. The call is bottom-up, which means no topic prescription; instead you must demonstrate a disruptive innovation and a credible path to scale. Our first piece of advice is to ignore the flashy 2.5 million euro grant headline and focus on the 15-page impact section—Brussels reviewers are instructed to score societal resilience above technological novelty, so a pitch that shows how Anhalt-Bitterfeld’s chemical pipelines remain solvent during a ransomware winter will beat a zero-day detection engine that cannot articulate who gets protected. We coach applicants to anchor the narrative in a single postcode, then scale the benefit to the NUTS-2 region, then to the Union; that three-tier progression mirrors the scoring rubric and removes the temptation to spray hyperbole across the continent.

If you are a municipality or a county, the instrument changes but the logic remains. The Digital Europe Programme operates a rolling call for “Advanced Digital Skills and Infrastructures” that will disburse 580 million euros during the current MFF. The trick is that the call is published in two steps: first a framework partnership, then a specific grant agreement. Counties must therefore band together into consortia of at least three entities from two member states—exactly the constellation the Alliance already convenes across Bitterfeld, Brno and Bari. The application is only 30 pages, but the mandatory letters of support must be signed by regional presidents, not IT managers, which means the real work is political choreography rather than technical writing. We solved the problem by creating a signing calendar that starts six weeks before the deadline and uses county protocol officers as couriers; the result was 23 signatures in nine days and a 1.8 million euro award that financed the shared SOC without touching equity.

Research actors—universities, RTOs, even high-schools with FabLabs—enter through Horizon Europe’s “Research and Innovation Actions” (RIA). The current cyber cluster, HORIZON-CL3-2025-CS-01, offers up to 4 million euros per project and explicitly favours consortia that include at least one “Associated Region” defined as NUTS-3 areas with GDP per capita below 75 % of EU average. Anhalt-Bitterfeld qualifies automatically, which turns the county into a sought-after partner rather than a supplicant. The competitive edge comes from the Living Lab status that the county council conferred on the Alliance last spring; that designation is worth 20 points out of 100 in the evaluation grid, the equivalent of promising a 15 % better detection rate. Our academic partners therefore lead with governance, not technology, describing how ethical review boards, data-sovereignty officers and citizen panels are baked into the project by statute—something a purely metropolitan consortium cannot imitate without sounding hypothetical.

"Funding is not a lottery ticket; it is a metro map—miss one station and you ride in circles."

Once the appropriate door is identified, the next filter is financial leverage. Brussels does not like stranded capital; it wants every euro of grant to pull at least one euro of private or regional money. For SMEs the simplest form is balance-sheet equity, but counties can deploy revolving funds guaranteed under the European Investment Fund. The Alliance negotiated a master EIF umbrella that covers 75 % of any loan taken by a federation member, up to 2.5 million euros per borrower. The guarantee is recognised by promotional banks in all 27 member states, which means a Maltese SME can walk into its local bank and receive EIF-backed working capital the same week it submits the Horizon application, provided the loan purpose is tied to the project work-packages. That single piece of paper turns a 2.5 million euro grant request into a 5 million euro deployable envelope, doubling the scope without increasing the ask from Brussels—and, crucially, without diluting cap tables.

The final mile is compliance pre-emption. Every call now embeds GDPR-by-design, NIS2-readiness and, from 2026 onwards, sustainability tagging under the CSRD. Instead of treating these as addenda, we reverse the order: the first draft of any proposal is the data-management plan, the energy-consumption worksheet and the gender-balance matrix. Only when those sheets are audit-ready do we allow engineers to write the technical work-packages. The approach sounds pedantic, but it shortens evaluation time by an average of six weeks because reviewers no longer bounce proposals back for missing DPO letters or inadequate carbon accounting. In the last submission round the Alliance achieved a 100 % pass rate on compliance screening, something only 12 % of applicants manage, effectively moving our proposals to the technical-scoring track while competitors are still rewriting privacy annexes.

What emerges from the wall-sized metro map is therefore not a collection of lucky breaks but a repeatable sequence: qualify your actor type, lock the narrative to a postcode, secure EIF leverage, pre-draft compliance. The sequence fits on one side of A3, and the margins are large enough to scribble phone numbers of the Brussels desk officers who actually pick up the phone. We print it fresh every Monday because the calls change, but the stations stay the same. The counties that follow the map do not always win, but they stop getting lost, and that is how a Saxony-Anhalt bicycle eventually becomes a continent-wide transit system.

The Cyber Resilience Alliance is a public-private partnership established 2025, led by CypSec, Validato and the County of Mansfeld-Südharz. The Alliance operates a sovereign private-cloud security stack, a shared SOC and an cyber academy, aiming to make Mansfeld-Südharz the reference site for rural cyber resilience by 2030.

Media Contact: Daria Fediay, Chief Executive Officer at CypSec - daria.fediay@cypsec.de.