Cleantech for Wallonia and Vaasa (C4W) is an MSCA COFUND programme coordinated by the University of Mons and jointly led with the University of Vaasa. Alessandro Brunetti contributed to the funding work while working as an EU project manager at UMONS.
This distinction matters: C4W is a UMONS project, not an iQrypto project and not an Arvacore award.
C4W at a glance
According to CORDIS:
- programme: Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions - COFUND
- grant agreement: 101261746
- coordinator: Universite de Mons
- joint programme with: University of Vaasa
- EU contribution: EUR 3,525,000
- start: 1 September 2026
- end: 31 August 2031
- programme scale: 25 postdoctoral fellowships, each designed around cleantech research, mobility and career development
Official source: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101261746
UMONS announcement: https://web.umons.ac.be/fr/c4w-un-financement-europeen-majeur-pour-renforcer-lexpertise-cleantech-de-lumons-et-de-luniversite-de-vaasa/
What makes COFUND different from a normal research proposal
A COFUND proposal is a programme-design exercise as much as a research-funding exercise. Evaluators need to understand how the institution will recruit, select, supervise, train and develop researchers over several years.
The scientific themes matter, but the credibility of the programme also depends on operational details:
- open, transparent and merit-based recruitment;
- supervision and career-development structures;
- mobility and secondments;
- training architecture;
- institutional co-funding and governance;
- links to non-academic organisations;
- long-term value beyond an individual fellowship.
The C4W programme logic
CORDIS describes C4W as a cleantech programme designed to strengthen research excellence and innovation capacity across Wallonia and Vaasa. The programme combines postdoctoral research with mobility, secondments and a dedicated entrepreneurship pathway.
That is an important proposal lesson: a strong COFUND application has to explain why the programme is more valuable than simply financing 25 separate researchers.
The value comes from the common structure around them.
Alessandro's perspective from UMONS
Since May 2021, Alessandro has worked in European R&D project management at UMONS. His work sits in the university environment where research teams move from scientific idea to consortium, institutional commitment, application and funded-project delivery.
C4W forms part of that professional experience. The useful lesson for Arvacore is not to present a university award as a consultancy success. It is to bring the institutional perspective into future MSCA work:
- what a host must decide before the proposal is written;
- where programme rules become operational commitments;
- how training and career development need to be designed rather than described;
- why governance and selection procedures must be credible before funding;
- how a proposal becomes a programme that the institution can actually run.
What applicants can take from this
For MSCA COFUND and Doctoral Networks, ask three questions early:
- What is the network/programme-level value? What becomes possible because the researchers are part of one structured programme?
- What mechanisms create that value? Training, supervision, secondments and knowledge transfer need named mechanisms and owners.
- Can the institution deliver the promises? Recruitment rules, co-funding, supervision capacity and governance must survive implementation.
Continue with MSCA resources
- MSCA hub ->
- MSCA supervision and training ->
- MSCA impact ->
- MSCA proposal support ->
- All selected project experience ->
From proposal language to programme operations
COFUND proposals are unusually sensitive to whether the institutional promises are operational. A sentence about excellent supervision eventually becomes supervisor selection, workload, monitoring and escalation. A commitment to transparent recruitment becomes a published process, evaluation criteria, conflict-of-interest rules and an auditable decision trail. A promise of intersectoral exposure becomes real secondment agreements and host capacity.
This is why institutional project-management experience matters during proposal preparation. The application is easier to strengthen when the team asks not only whether a sentence sounds convincing, but also who will implement it, when, with what evidence and under which governance process.
That same discipline is useful outside COFUND. Horizon Europe consortia, Doctoral Networks and other multi-beneficiary actions all become easier to manage when the proposal already contains clear ownership and decision logic.
C4W as evidence, not a borrowed success story
Arvacore should use C4W carefully. The project demonstrates the kind of European programme-development environment Alessandro has worked in at UMONS, while the grant itself belongs to UMONS and its programme partners.
The correct provenance is:
UMONS -> C4W MSCA COFUND -> Alessandro's UMONS project-management experience -> experience informing Arvacore.
That chain is more credible than collapsing the project into a generic list of Arvacore wins, and it gives prospective applicants a clearer picture of where the practical knowledge comes from.
Official evidence
- CORDIS project record: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101261746
- UMONS project announcement: https://web.umons.ac.be/fr/c4w-un-financement-europeen-majeur-pour-renforcer-lexpertise-cleantech-de-lumons-et-de-luniversite-de-vaasa/
- UMONS staff profile: https://staff.umons.ac.be/Alessandro.BRUNETTI/