Dissemination and exploitation: what evaluators actually expect

The three activities are not synonyms

• Communication: telling wider audiences that the project exists and why it matters. Starts at month one, targets the public, media, and policy audiences.
• Dissemination: making results available to those who can use them — peer communities, industry, standardisation bodies. Free of charge and public.
• Exploitation: putting results to use — commercially, in policy, in further research, in standards, or internally by a partner.

Start from Key Exploitable Results

A KER is a specific result with an identified user and a route to use. Listing 'a platform' is not a KER; listing 'a validated scheduling module for regional grid operators, licensed by Partner B' is.

• Identify three to six KERs — more than that usually means the results are not really separable.
• For each KER: owner, background and foreground IP, target user, maturity at project end, and the route to use after the project.
• Record joint ownership situations early. Unresolved co-ownership is the most common cause of stalled exploitation.

Build the plan around audiences

Weak plans list channels. Strong plans list audiences, then the message each one needs, then the channel and the indicator.

• Scientific community: peer-reviewed publications with open access, conferences, preprints, open datasets.
• Industry and adopters: technical workshops, demonstrations, pilot participation, trade press.
• Policy and standards: position papers, contributions to standardisation bodies, briefings, participation in relevant EU platforms.
• General public: website, short video, plain-language summaries, events such as European Researchers' Night.

Indicators that survive review

• Set baselines and targets per year, not one number for the whole project.
• Prefer indicators of uptake over indicators of activity — pilot users onboarded beats posts published.
• Assign each indicator to a partner. Unassigned indicators are not measured.

Obligations you must not miss

• Open access to peer-reviewed publications is mandatory; research data follows the 'as open as possible, as closed as necessary' principle with a Data Management Plan.
• EU emblem and funding statement on all communication and dissemination material, with the standard disclaimer.
• Results ownership, protection and exploitation duties continue after the project ends, including reporting on exploitation.
• Notify the Commission before disseminating results that could be protected, so protection is not lost by disclosure.