[2] Awards were worth up to 1.25 Million Euros, to be spent over a period of five years.
It was meant to attract the strongest scientists, irrespective of age and gender.
In a first step, the applications were assessed by the participating organisation from the proposed host country.
The co-initiating institution EuroHORCS, founded in 1992 and dissolved in 2011 and succeeded by Science Europe, was an association of 18 research organisations from 15 European countries, all of which being members of the European Union at the time except Switzerland and Turkey.
[4] The EURYI Award was the blueprint for the much larger ERC Grant scheme, initiated in 2007 within the Seventh Framework Programme, with Professor Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, the initiator of the EURYI Award, being the ERC's first Secretary General.