The European Commission adopted the EIC work programme for 2022 this February. This new European Innovation Council (EIC) work programme is set to open new funding opportunities for breakthrough innovators worth over €1.7 billion. Let’s find out how EIC will allocate this funding and what novelties we will see later this year.
The new 2022 EIC funding opportunities
EIC Pathfinder
EIC Pathfinder will benefit from the new EIC work programme with €350 million to support multi-disciplinary research teams. This programme supports visionary research projects to achieve potential technology breakthroughs.
EIC Pathfinder programme will provide €3-4 million EU grants to research teams, and the first calls are expected to open early in March. Specifically, the Pathfinder Open calls will go public on 1 March, while the Pathfinder Challenges calls a little later this year on 15 June.
Much of the European funding under EIC pathfinder will be awarded through open calls without pre-set thematic priorities. On the other end, €167 million will try to tackle the following six challenges:
- Carbon dioxide & nitrogen management and valorisation
- Mid to long term and systems integrated energy storage,
- cardiogenomics,
- healthcare continuum technologies,
- DNA-based digital data storage and alternative quantum information processing,
- communication, and sensing.
EIC Transition
The 2022 EIC work programme has earmarked €131 million EU funding to turn research results into innovation opportunities through EIC Transition. The calls will focus on the results of EIC Pathfinder projects and from the European Research Council Proof of Concept projects. Their end goal will be to help mature the technologies and develop business cases for the future commercialization of those innovations.
Consortia will be able to submit their applications by 1 March, and the grants will start from €2.5 million. The calls for funding will be in any field of science or technology and deal with specific challenges in various strategic fields.
From the total amount, EIC transition will give €60.5 million to tackle three Transition Challenges:
- Green digital devices for the future,
- process, and system integration of clean energy technologies.
- RNA-based therapies and diagnostics for complex or rare genetic diseases.
EIC Accelerator
Finally, the largest amount of EIC work programme 2022 budget will be given to EICAccelerator. Notably, this programme will open calls for startups and SMEs of €1,16 billion to develop or scale up innovations that can create new markets or disrupt the current ones.
EIC accelerator will provide blended finance, a combination of equity (between €0.5 - €15 million) with grants (up to €2.5 million). Applicants are free to apply for EIC Accelerator funding at any time via the EIC platform
About €537 million will go towards breakthrough innovations for technologies for:
- Open Strategic Autonomy,
- technologies for ‘Fit for 55’.
The novelties of the EIC work programme 2022
A new EIC Scale-Up 100 initiative
EIC Having supported thousands of small and medium businesses (SMEs) and startups in the past, this initiative will try to find the top 100 promising EU companies in deep tech that can potentially become the EU’s next unicorns.
Equity investments above €15 million
Companies working on technologies of high European interest will now be able to apply for more than €15 million EIC investments through the EIC Accelerator.
Stronger support to women innovators
EIC Work Programme 2022 will seek to reduce gender inequality in research by introducing a gender and diversity index. Based on that, it will try to encourage gender diversity in companies, while at the same time it will give this information to stakeholders. Additionally, the EU prize for Women Innovators competition will expand further. It will include two additional prizes for innovators under 35, reaching a total of six. Namely, there will be three prizes for the most inspiring women innovators and three awards for the “Rising Innovators” under 35.
More frequent application deadlines
Finally, a novelty in this new EIC work programme will be more frequent application deadlines in 2022. At the same time, resubmissions to EIC Accelerator will now have a process of describing and defending the improvements made following the example of EIC Pathfinder.
Conclusion
European Innovation Council (EIC) is paramount to support the transition to the future through innovation. The additional EU funding of €1.7 billion that will be given to EIC Pathfinder, EIC transition, EIC accelerator, as was decided in the EIC work programme 2022, is essential to support European research and businesses to fund their innovative and costly projects. Also, the novelties introduced will try to make EIC funding more targeted, effective, and more inclusive.
To learn more about the new EIC work programme, you should join the European Innovation Council Info Day on 22 February 2022.
