Expanding Academia-Enterprise Collaborations

Overview

Objectives

The action 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, e.g. through boosting innovation and entrepreneurship within their activities.

Activities/actions supported

The action supports co-designed programmes of activities of at least two (2) years, proposed jointly by educational institutions, research institutions, and other R&I actors from ‘emerging’ and ‘moderate’ innovation ecosystems and the private sector from innovation hubs (‘strong innovators’ and ‘innovation leaders’), to ensure better connectedness between higher education institutions and research organisation with other actors of innovation ecosystems. These could include:

• Engagement of business experts into the implementation of networking activities and building innovation ecosystem around the university/research institution;
• Engagement of students, graduates, researchers and workforce from various disciplines and departments into the innovation ecosystem, with a focus on networking and building networks around educational and research institutions as centres of gravity, and engaging in companies’ structures and business processes;
• Engagement of students and researchers in start-ups from both their immediate local environment and beyond (regional, national, transnational) working with various actors from the innovation ecosystem to experience what starting and running a venture entails;
• Creation of synergies between students, graduates, researchers, innovators, education institutes, research performing organisations, and business partners, locally, at EU level, and globally targeting the creation of networks and communities of practices in the field of deep tech to stimulate the market uptake of results and new technologies, as well as their co-creation.

Anticipated outcomes

Projects results are expected to contribute to four (4) 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;
• Improved flows of knowledge, skills, and talents between educational institutions and other innovation ecosystem actors at various levels of development;
• Improved skills of all involved ecosystem actors to increase innovation potential, inter-sectoral mobility, and market uptake of new technologies;
• 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[3];
• Enhanced entrepreneurial activity in developing innovation ecosystems;
• Increased engagement and connectedness with other ecosystem actors 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 non associated third countries or international organisations (including international European research organisations4) is eligible to participate, 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.

For more information, please refer to the text of the call.

Overview of award criteria

The proposals will be evaluated and ranked depending on excellence, impact, and quality and efficiency of the implementation.

Procedures

Application procedures

All proposals must be submitted electronically via the Funders & Tenders Portal electronic submission system: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/horizon-eie-2024-connect-02-01?status=31094501,31094502&callIdentifier=HORIZON-EIE-2024-CONNECT-02&order=DESC&pageNumber=1&pageSize=50&sortBy=startDate

Application support available

Support can be found through the following documents:

• Online Manual
• Horizon Europe Programme Guide

For more information please check the text of the call.

Useful links

Link to funding opportunity

Link to the programme for more info