Call for Proposals: Expanding Academia – Enterprise Collaborations

For our Pledgers and the Talents following the EIT Deep Tech Talent Initiative we would like to draw your attention to this funding opportunity.

As part of the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON), the European Commission (EC) has launched its Interconnected Innovation Ecosystems Call with a total budget of 3.5 million EUR to increase the connectedness of educational and research institutions.

Projects results are expected to contribute to four (4) or more of the following expected outcomes of the Call:

• Improve integration of research institutions, Higher Education Institutions, vocational schools, and similar organisations into Europe’s innovation ecosystems
• Improve flows of knowledge, skills, and talents between educational institutions and other innovation ecosystem actors at various levels of development, including in the deep tech field in line with the New European Innovation Agenda
• Improve skills of all involved ecosystem actors to increase innovation potential, inter-sectoral mobility, and market uptake of new technologies
• Improve connections of educational institutions to high-quality remote testing, validation, and up-scaling of innovations delivered by research and technology infrastructures across the EU
• Improve competence of students, graduates, researchers, and workforce to launch, run, and lead successful and profitable start-ups, including in the deep tech field
• Enhance availability of local talents equipped with skills to support business acceleration and digitalisation;
• Enhance entrepreneurial activity in developing innovation ecosystems and their upscaling and interconnectedness across the EU supported by citizens and local initiatives in order to build innovative solutions to current and future challenges
• Increase engagement and connectedness with other ecosystem actors (e.g. other educational institutions, Technology Transfer Offices, Research and Technology Organisations, local and regional enterprises, private companies, start-ups, early-stage companies, accelerators, incubators, etc.) within and between regions
• Increase youth (self) employability and gender balance in collaborations

 

Educational and research institutions are considered key places for knowledge production and innovation, and should be well connected within and beyond their respective regional innovation ecosystems.

The goal of this Call is to make sure all education and research institutions are part of networks for innovation or strengthen their existing links.

 

The Interconnected Innovation Ecosystems Call: Expanding Academia-Enterprise Collaborations supports co-designed programmes of activities of at least two years that should ensure gender-balanced participation opportunities, and are proposed jointly by educational institutions, research institutions, and other R&I actors from ‘emerging’ and ‘moderate’ innovation ecosystems and the private sector from innovation hubs.

To ensure that the impact of the action goes beyond consortium members and their respective countries, it is encouraged that the selected consortia work closely with innovation agencies from their respective territories and beyond, and seek synergies with relevant EU initiatives in the field of university-business cooperation, such as knowledge and innovation alliances under the Erasmus+ programme or the EIT Knowledge Innovation Communities (KICs) to allow for complementarities and possible use of already existing EIT KICs’ knowledge, expertise, networks, communities or platforms such as those developed under the EIT Initiative on Innovation Capacity Building for Higher Education that focuses on strengthening partnerships between higher education and businesses including developing innovation and business support services.