Creativity
Failure
Transcendence
Passion
What If
Freedom
Bottom Up
High Risk, High Gain
Intuition
The Frontier
Serendipity
The breakthrough

Intuition

INTUITION

Looking at problems from the same angles isn't what ERC grantees do. The ERC promotes creativity, ideas that completely change the way we look at issues and solutions that we try to find. The spark of intuition in turning a question upside down or analyzing its components in a new way is what makes ERC grantees different. Sometimes creativity is a moment, an idea that completely changes someone's perspective. Sometimes it's an attitude, based on never accepting convention and trying to break preconceived notions and build new ones. Either way, it's what fuels the ERC's discoveries.

Michaël Gillon, astronomer and ERC grantee from the University of Liege, stunned the world with his recent discovery of seven potentially inhabitable planets orbiting Trappist-1 star.
Dr Gillon said: "Without the EU funding it would not have been possible to arrive at this discovery. I'm very grateful that the European Research Council invested in our idea and believed in our intuition back in 2013."

The author

Massimo Colella

Born in Napoli, Italy, Massimo earned a degree in Communication Sciences, after which time he worked as an advertising art director in Milan and London and finally in Paris, where he cofounded La Bande Destinée in 2007. Passionate about comics, cinema and moving images in general, from 19th century’s phenakistoscopes to animated gifs and cinemagraphs.