In this solo episode, I share my approach to find the right partners for EU proposals - whether you’re building a consortium from scratch, filling gaps in a value chain, or replacing a partner at short notice. I set the scene (coordinator vs partner roles, defining the needed organisation type and budget) and then walk through the sources that actually yield results: your network, CORDIS (projects and call topics), project websites, organisations’ own pages, old brokerage/matchmaking sites (e.g., B2Match) and LinkedIn - plus when in-person brokerage is worth the trip.

From there, I explain how to work the funnel: start broad in CORDIS and brokerage sites, shortlist by relevance, and log everything in your own Excel sheet (projects, partners, abstracts, and notes). I cover contact identification (why brokerage profiles are gold, how to hunt via project pages, Google and LinkedIn), outreach strategies (why a quick phone call beats a cold email, how to write concise value-led emails, the realities of LinkedIn messaging), and data hygiene (GDPR, avoiding personal data in AI tools, and using abstracts/keywords with ChatGPT to speed analysis). The toughest challenge? Keeping the overview. I show how to build a reusable pipeline so your partner search becomes faster, cleaner and repeatable.