If you are preparing an EIC Accelerator application and your value proposition cannot be said in one crisp sentence, evaluators will treat the rest as noise.

This is one of the fastest ways to get a NO-GO even when the technology is genuinely strong.

Here is what is happening in the evaluator’s head.
They are not asking whether your idea sounds interesting. They are asking whether a real buyer gets a measurable advantage that is clearly superior to today’s best alternative, and whether that advantage is strong enough to trigger adoption.

When the value proposition is unclear, three red flags appear at once.

1 The benefit is fuzzy.

You describe what the product is, not what changes for the buyer. Evaluators then cannot judge whether the benefit exceeds the costs, effort, switching risk, and procurement friction.

2 The advantage is not quantified.
Words like better, faster, safer, cheaper, and scalable do not count without a before-and-after. If you do not provide an anchor metric, evaluators cannot separate substance from hype.

3 The alternative is missing.
If you do not name what the buyer uses today, your innovation reads like a category description. Evaluators then assume it is incremental or that the market already has workable solutions.

Expert recommendation you can apply today.
Run the one-sentence test. If you cannot write this sentence, stop writing the proposal and fix it first.

For a specific buyer in a specific context, we improve one measurable outcome from A to B compared to the best current alternative, thereby unlocking one new capability or removing one hard constraint.

If you cannot fill A and B with real numbers from pilots, lab validation, or credible benchmarks, your value proposition is not ready for EIC scrutiny.

DOs and Don´t DOs.
Do this.
Name the buyer and the moment of pain. Name the metric. Name the baseline. Name your verified improvement. Name the alternative.

Not that.
Describe the platform, the architecture, the modules, and then hope the evaluator infers the benefit.

Do this.
Show why the problem is genuinely unmet. Unmet means today’s solutions leave a serious consequence on the table, and you can quantify that consequence in money, time, risk, compliance exposure, or mission-critical performance.

Not that.
Say the market is big and growing; therefore, the need is urgent.

Do this.
Connect your breakthrough claim to the unmet need and to the absence of full solutions. Breakthrough in EIC terms is not new tech. It is a new capability that the market cannot get today, with consequences strong enough to justify funding risk.

Not that.
Position your project as an upgrade to an existing workflow, even if the upgrade is impressive.

Common mistake that burns weeks.
Founders mix three different sentences into one paragraph.
The problem statement, the solution description, and the impact story.
Evaluators read that as a lack of clarity, and they stop trusting the logic chain.

A quick fix is to separate them.
Problem in one sentence with quantified consequence.
Current alternative in one sentence with its limit.
Your measurable advantage in one sentence with a proof cue.

If you want, send us your current one-sentence value proposition, and we will tell you what an evaluator is likely to object to, and what evidence would neutralise it.

email: contact@siliconcp.com
book a meeting: https://calendly.com/siliconcapital/30-min-presentation.