About the Episode
In episode #229 of The Grant, published on 15 June 2026 and running for 1 hour 18 minutes, host Niels Tudor-Vinther sits down with two guests who have each spent years building EU funding functions from the ground up.
Stephanie Harfensteller has been developing the EU funding capability at FIR since 2019, working within a research-focused university environment. David Christensen has been doing something structurally similar inside BOFA on Bornholm, but from within a public-sector municipal setting. Together, they bring a rare combination of perspectives on what it actually takes to construct a funding team that can go the distance — not just process paperwork, but genuinely drive results across the full project lifecycle.
Key Topics Covered
- Redefining the funding support unit: Moving beyond an administrative service desk to a function that actively supports proposal development, project execution, and long-term networking and strategic positioning.
- Research institution vs. municipality: Contrasting the unique structural and cultural challenges of building a funding team inside a research-focused university versus a public-sector municipality — and the surprisingly similar realities both settings produce.
- Hiring for the full lifecycle: Why the most valuable hires are strong generalists who understand the entire arc of a project — from initial idea through to exploitation — and can bridge different departmental functions.
- Recruitment, training and talent development: Practical strategies for identifying the skills your team actually needs, overcoming the difficulty of finding the right profiles, and developing junior staff through life experience and continuous learning.
- Knowledge management and continuity: How to build systems that capture institutional knowledge and recorded experience so that the team does not lose critical expertise when people change roles or move on.
- Navigating organisational constraints: Working with — and around — management support structures, political priorities, and public perception, and turning those constraints into strategic levers rather than obstacles.
- Leadership within a funding team: The personal qualities that matter most in a funding team leader: patience, the willingness to delegate, and the ability to adapt as your role inevitably evolves.
- Sustaining a consistent funding flow: The ongoing pressure of delivering successful proposals year after year in an environment of declining success rates and intensifying competition across EU programmes.
Why You Should Listen
Building a functioning EU funding unit is one of the most demanding — and most under-discussed — challenges in the field. Most conversations about EU funding focus on the instruments, the calls, and the proposals themselves. Far fewer address the human infrastructure required to make any of it work sustainably. This episode fills that gap.
Whether you are setting up a funding team for the first time, trying to professionalise an existing one, or simply trying to hold together what you already have, Stephanie Harfensteller and David Christensen speak with the kind of hard-won candour that only comes from actually living through the process. Their advice is grounded, specific, and immediately actionable.
Among the most resonant insights from the conversation: "You need strong generalists that understand the whole lifecycle of a project from the idea to exploitation." And on the relationship-building side: "Build relationships before you need them." Both are deceptively simple principles that take years to internalise — and this episode helps shortcut that journey considerably.
The episode is equally relevant for those working inside large research institutions and those operating within smaller public-sector or regional organisations. The challenges may be dressed differently, but the underlying questions — who do you hire, how do you keep them, and how do you protect institutional knowledge — are universal.
Listen to the full episode on The Grant episode page, and explore the full podcast archive and show resources at thegrant.eu. The Grant is hosted by Niels Tudor-Vinther and is a valued resource in the EMDESK partner community. If the conversation about team structure and project lifecycle management resonates with you, it is worth exploring how EMDESK supports funding teams in managing exactly those challenges — from proposal collaboration through to project execution and reporting.
