The new guide explores and provides examples of synergies between the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology.
In line with the Horizon Europe regulation, the programme offers new opportunities to facilitate collaboration between its different components. The new guide “Synergies between the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions And the European Institute of Innovation and Technology” provides an overview of the different types of actions and gives examples of how stakeholders involved in one instrument could benefit from actions under the other and further strengthen the effectiveness of them in line with the principle of non-cumulative award and prohibition of double funding. Hence, the guide lists existing examples of synergies and refers to the CORDIS Project & Results Platform, which provides an overview of further successful projects.
The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) have become the Union’s reference programme for doctoral education and postdoctoral training. The MSCA provide support for research and innovation, as well as the training and career development of researchers, in all fields of scientific research, through different actions. While all actions are based on annual calls for applications, some are mono-beneficiary (MSCA COFUND, MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships) and others multi-beneficiary (MSCA Doctoral Networks, MSCA Staff Exchanges, MSCA and Citizens).
The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) contributes to the EU’s sustainable economic growth and competitiveness. The EIT strengthens Europe’s ability to innovate by powering solutions to pressing global challenges and nurturing entrepreneurship. It acts mainly through the EIT Knowledge & Innovation Communities (KICs), partnerships that bring together organisations from higher education, research and the non-academic sector. While the newest KIC focusing on culture and creativity will become fully operational as of 2024 (see SwissCore article), there are already eight KICs up and running.
The MSCA and the EIT bring together many stakeholders from the knowledge triangle. For a considerable number of these stakeholders, both MSCA and EIT actions could be of potential interest. For example, the EIT KICs and their non-academic partner organisations could host an MSCA Postdoctoral fellow to profit from synergies. This placement allows the MSCA fellow to acquire entrepreneurial experience and transferable skills and the hosting KICs partners to build on the MSCA project results and scale them towards the market. The following two examples from the guide demonstrate the potential of synergies and that concrete projects are already using them.
The Innovator Fellowship is a specific training for postdoctoral fellows to gain essential entrepreneurial skills and the networks to drive food system transformation through mobilising research outputs. The fellowship offers MSCA researchers the possibility to work closely with EIT Food and experience the world’s largest and most dynamic food innovation community, where 5 Swiss research institutions and companies are also present.
Another example is PERSEUS, a doctoral programme that aims to educate top-level researchers in the thematic areas of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Twins, the Internet of Things, Extended Reality and Information and Cyber Security. As a partner of the EIT Climate-KIC, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology collaborates with 11 academic partners in 8 countries and 8 industrial partners in Norway to further develop the PERSEUS project.