Expanding Academia-Enterprise Collaborations

Overview

Objectives

This call should foster the creation of innovation ecosystems with educational and research institutions, or strengthen their existing links. Proposals should outline activities for supporting educational and research institutions to take a greater entrepreneurial role.

Activities/actions supported

The proposals should leverage best practices of the private and public sector in the EU's innovation hubs and enhance collaboration between businesses with R&I actors in educational and research institutions. The proposals should outline activites that will foster connectedness of the innovation ecosystems while preventing brain drain. The action supports co-designed programmes of activities of at least 2 years, proposed jointly by educational institutions and R&I actors from 'emerging' innovation ecosystems. The proposed programmes of activities should also ensure gender-balanced participation opportunities.

Anticipated outcomes

Projects results are expected to contribute to four or more of the following expected outcomes:

• Improved integration of research institutions, Higher Education Institutions, vocational schools, and similar organisations into Europe’s innovation ecosystems by establishing better links with start-ups and start-up networks, accelerators and incubators, business angels and investor communities;
• Improved flows of knowledge, skills, and talents between educational institutions and other innovation ecosystem actors at various levels of development, including in the deep tech[1] field in line with the New European Innovation Agenda[2];
• Improved skills of all involved ecosystem actors to increase innovation potential, inter-sectoral mobility, and market uptake of new technologies; Targeted are skills necessary and responsive to innovation and labour market needs on digital, green, and entrepreneurial skills, networking skills, risk taking, and in particular in the deep tech field;
• Improved connections of educational institutions to high-quality remote testing, validation, and up-scaling of innovations delivered by research and technology infrastructures across the EU;
• Improved competence of students, graduates, researchers, and workforce to launch, run, and lead successful and profitable start-ups, including in the deep tech field;
• Enhanced availability of local talents equipped with skills to support business acceleration and digitalisation;
• Enhanced 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;
• Increased 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;
• Increased youth (self) employability and gender balance in collaborations.

Institution providing the funding

European Commission

Size of funding

EUR 2.500.000

Conditions

Overview of eligibility criteria

Any legal entity, regardless of its place of establishment, including legal entities from nonassociated third countries or international organisations (including international European research organisations100) is eligible to participate (whether it is eligible for funding or not), provided that the conditions laid down in the Horizon Europe Regulation have been met, along with any other conditions laid down in the specific call topic. Beneficiaries and affiliated entities must register in the Participant Register before submitting their application, in order to get a participant identification code (PIC) and be validated by the Central Validation Service (REA Validation) before signing the grant agreement. For the validation, they will be asked to upload the necessary documents showing their legal status and origin during the grant preparation stage. A validated PIC is not a prerequisite for submitting an application.

Overview of award criteria

The award criteria is depedent on excellence, impact and quality and efficiency of the implementation. Each criterion will be scored out of five and the individual threshold will be 3.

Procedures

Application procedures

All proposals must be submitted electronically via the Funders and Tenders Portal electronic submission system. The application form will have two parts: Part A contains administrative information about the applicant organisations, the summarised budget for the proposal and call-specific questions and Part B contains the technical description of the project.

Useful links

Link to funding opportunity

Link to the programme for more info