The first projects looking to take speculative technological ideas and make them real, begin their work, as the EU ramps up support for breakthrough technology.
The first batch of 13 selected projects under the new EIC Transition to Innovation Activities instrument have now begun their work towards technological and societal innovations. The instrument is a new creation under Horizon 2020. Its objective is to turn promising results from EIC Pathfinder/FET-funded (FET Open or FET-Proactive) projects into a higher level of development, so that their viability as business propositions can be clearly evaluated.
This first call of the new instrument was oriented to support innovative technologies in the five following areas considered as crucial for future technological and societal progress: Micro- and Nano-technologies, Artificial Intelligence and advanced robotics, Technologies for the life sciences, health and treatment, Low-carbon energy and climate change technologies and Interaction technologies (including virtual-, augmented-, and mixed reality).
The impetus behind the introduction of the instrument is to provide funding of €1-2 million develop applications for the many exciting research results being produced in the Pathfinder and FET projects under Horizon 2020. The Transition instrument complements the EIC Innovation LaunchPad, conceived on a similar rationale, which provides smaller funding amounts to examine the business case of applications for FET or Pathfinder results. These Transition and LaunchPad instruments serve to bridge the gap in funding between early stage research in the Pathfinder and the late stage development and commercialisation supported in the EIC Accelerator.
Under Horizon Europe, the next Framework Programme, the transition instruments are expected to undergo changes and become more ambitious in scope. More funding will go to fulfil this objective of exploiting research results, and there are expected to be both top-down calls as well as bottom-up calls, with no limitation in terms of technology specifications. There is Swiss participation already in this first batch of projects. Multiwave, a Swiss SME, leads the M-One project working on brain imaging technology, and the Fondazione Cardiocentro Ticino is a consortium partner on the MARVEL project developing medicinal products for cardiac repair.