Five years of public ERC funding data turned into interactive dashboards in 15 minutes — using Claude AI and a Google Sheets MCP connection.
EC R&I Dashboard (Qlik Sense) — public database of all ERC-funded projects; filtered by grant type and call year, exported as CSV
Google Sheets MCP — connects Claude Desktop directly to the spreadsheet; Claude reads, cleans, and structures the raw export in context
Claude AI — performs cross-grant comparisons, institution ranking, domain breakdowns, and funding aggregations
Chart.js HTML dashboards — interactive, filterable, embeddable; one per grant type with country and institution drill-downs
CORDIS — cross-checks project abstracts, PI names, and institutional affiliations where R&I export fields were ambiguous
Understand which institutions win ERC grants, which domains dominate, and how funding is distributed — without spending days in a BI tool.
The EC publishes granular data on every funded project but it lives in Qlik Sense — a platform most researchers and grant advisors have never used. Cleaning, analysing, and visualising the export has historically required data skills most people don’t have time to develop.
‘Detailed ERC grant data isn’t publicly available.’ It is. Every funded project is documented — institution, PI, country, funding, dates, abstract, CORDIS link — in a freely downloadable EC database. The bottleneck was never access. It was the capacity to analyse it at scale.
Qlik Sense is not intuitive for first-time users — Non-obvious how to apply the right filters and export a clean dataset across multiple grant types.
**Apply all filters before exporting** — Qlik exports whatever is currently visible. Learn the filter panel first.
Raw export needs structuring before any insight emerges — Inconsistent institution naming and mixed grant types require cleaning before analysis is possible.
**Claude via Google Sheets MCP** cleans and structures the data in context — no manual formula work.
Four dashboards would normally take days to build — STG, COG, ADG, and SyG each have different structures and institution profiles — typically separate pipelines.
Claude handled all four in a **single session** with filterable tables, country breakdowns, and institution drill-downs.
Four interactive dashboards covering STG, COG, ADG, and SyG for call years 2021–2024
Funding patterns identified: Germany and Max Planck lead STG/COG/ADG; CNRS leads Synergy; Life Sciences dominates across all types
Analysis time reduced from days to ~15 minutes
Reusable workflow — repeatable each trimester as the EC updates its R&I database
The data was always public. What changed is the capacity to work with it without a data team. Connecting Claude to a live spreadsheet via MCP removed the last barrier between public EC data and actionable grant intelligence — and the workflow is repeatable for any Horizon Europe programme.