The European Commission’s publicly available repository of innovations with market potential now contains more than 10’000 innovations developed with EU funding.
On 19 January, the EU Innovation Radar hit the milestone of 10’000 innovations developed with EU funding. The 10’000th innovation originated in the Horizon 2020 HERMES project and is a cutting-edge innovation paving the way for a new generation of wireless transceivers that can empower energy-efficient real-time cooperation between autonomous systems. The Innovation Radar evaluated the project as having a very high potential to create new markets.
The Innovation Radar has been running since 2015 and is available to anyone interested, be they citizens, journalists, or other innovators. So far, the Innovation Radar contains information on one-quarter of all EU-funded research and innovation actions launched by the European Commission under Horizon 2020. All these projects, taken together, have received more than €10 billion in EU funding. Data underpinning the Innovation Radar stem from a survey developed by the Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT) and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission. This survey is conducted during periodic reviews of collaborative projects funded through European Union framework programmes like Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020.
The idea behind the European Innovation Radar is to make the outputs of EU innovation funding, for example, HERMES, easily discoverable by investors leading to more investments, which helps bring these innovations faster to market. Hence, the visibility the Innovation Radar gives can be understood as one of the many forms of support that the EU provides to encourage innovators throughout all phases of their development. Another form of support for innovators in their search for growth capital from private investors would be the EU-funded support action Dealflow.eu, which connects investors with EU innovators actively using Innovation Radar intelligence.
To have further visibility for the beneficiaries, the European Innovation Radar awards the Innovation Radar Prize on an annual base to EU-funded innovators, putting a spotlight on the high-potential innovations ready to get ‘out of the lab and into the market’. Most recently, the 2022 Innovation Radar prize was awarded to NVision Imaging Technologies from Germany for their ‘Cell level Metabolic Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)’, showing how quantum technology can significantly improve MRI capabilities in detecting the efficacy of medical treatments for cancer at early stages. NVision was financed through the European Innovation Council (EIC) Pathfinder programme in the MetaboliQs project. In 2019, the winner was SUPSI from Switzerland for their leadership role in developing robotic tech capable of executing repair tasks in harsh industrial environments (see euronews video).