As the European Innovation Council appoints a new President, its activities in 2023 ramp up with a focus on women-led companies and social innovation.
As the European Innovation Council (EIC) emerges from the teething troubles of the first years of Horizon Europe, it has appointed a new President with a strong innovation profile covering the span from university collaboration and policy to advising and investing in start-ups. The appointee, Michiel Scheffer, is a Dutch national with over 20 years of professional experience in business, academia, and public policy. He is the founder and CEO of Polisema BV, which provides advice and investment to start-ups. The starting date of Scheffer’s appointment is still to be determined. The EIC Board, which he will preside over, has a mandate to advise on overall strategy for the EIC as well as the EIC work programme for implementation. It identifies strategic portfolios of projects and the profile of EIC Programme Managers in addition to other actions to improve the European innovation ecosystem.
Scheffer arrives as the EIC seeks to put its initial troubles behind it. It had faced criticism regarding the slow progress in disbursing scale-up funding in the EIC Accelerator, as well as regarding the poor gender balance of funded companies and the complexity of the application process. In addressing these worries, the EIC Fund continues to progress in taking investment decisions on companies selected by the EIC Accelerator in 2021 and 2022. As of the end of March, it had taken 93 decisions worth €574.7 million, up from the 77 investment decisions taken into deep-tech companies worth over €521 million announced at the beginning of February 2023. In addition, a new set of 32 companies have been selected to receive European Innovation Council (EIC) funding, combining grants and equity, following the first 2023 EIC Accelerator cut-off in January. Interest in the EIC Fund as an investor remains undiminished by the past issues: the blended finance (grants combined with equity investments) recommendation remained broadly the same as in recent cut offs, grant first recommendations (with a possibility of later equity investments) rose again with grant only moving in the opposite direction.
In these latest Accelerator results, a positive trend on gender balance is also visible as 40% of the awarded companies have female leadership (understood as having a CEO, CTO or CSO role), the highest such share to date. To address the complaints surrounding the application process, the EIC Board has issued a statement with recommendations to improve the current platform. In particular they address shortcomings of the EIC AI platform that was introduced to process submissions at the beginning of Horizon Europe. They emphasise that it should be more user-friendly, allowing companies to complete submissions without outside consultant support, and more closely align to industry standards in format and content. They point to its limited reusability, lack of integration and interoperability with other widely used platforms, redundant or missing information, and technical shortcomings.
Other instruments of the EIC have also announced results, as the EIC Pathfinder selected 44 new projects for “cutting edge research projects to achieve breakthroughs” in six strategic so-called “Challenge” areas. The successful projects were chosen among 436 submitted eligible proposals and will receive up to €167 million of EU funding (on average €3.8 million per project). The novel portfolio approach within the Pathfinder programme is also gaining in intensity. EIC Programme Managers were directly involved in setting the challenges and selecting portfolios of projects from among the best applications, and they will now pro-actively manage these portfolios to increase impact. With each specific Challenge, the EIC will establish a portfolio of projects that explores different perspectives, competing approaches or complementary aspects of the Challenge. Selected projects will receive not only grants, but also access to tailored-made coaching under the EIC Business Acceleration Services and potential fast track access to the EIC Accelerator.
The third major programme run by the EIC, the Transition instrument, announced the statistics from the first 2023 cut-off. 180 proposals were received, of which 131 proposals from 26 countries have been submitted for topic-neutral Open call, and 49 proposals from 21 countries have been submitted the EIC Transition Challenges: (31 proposals under Full scale Micro-Nano-Bio devices for medical and medical research applications; 12 proposals under Chip-scale optical frequency combs; 6 proposals under Environmental intelligence). EIC Transition projects focus on results generated by EIC Pathfinder, FET (Future and Emerging Technologies) or European Research Council (ERC) Proof of Concept projects, to mature the technologies and build a business case for specific applications. Grants of up to €2.5 million are available to validate and demonstrate technology in application-relevant environment and develop market readiness.